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- Viking Quest the 33 year saga to find a game where I can go Berserker
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Viking Quest the 33 year saga to find a game where I can go Berserker
Over the next 33 years, I didn't think too much about Vikings until last year when I tried out 3 games about Vikings (Fire & Axe, Midgard and Vikings). I'm going to rate these games on a Berserker scale of 0 to 5.
Let's start with Vikings or Wikinger. The game Vikings is by far the most Euro of the three games. This game is essentially the Viking Shopping Network game or the Martha Steward Living Viking shopping and decorating game. I would compare it to California and Alhambra. Basically, you can buy stuff (fishermen, nobles, warriors, island pieces, etc) and decorate the stuff on your board if you can make it fit right. You get end up getting money and/or victory points for decorating your islands with different stuff. This game uses a Bob Barker Price is Right Rondel mechanism to price the stuff. Sometimes you need stuff really bad so you'll pay a lot for it other times you can wait for the Rondel to move and get stuff cheap. For me shopping and Vikings go together about as well as Brittney Spears working at my kids summer camp. Therefore, I'm going to give this game a Berserker rating of 0.
I had the high expectations for Fire & Ice a Viking Saga. Some people have classified this game as an Ameritrash - Euro Hybrid. I would tend to agree with calling it a Hybrid. Probably, both Euro snobs and Ameritrash purists would hate this game. On the positive side the game looks cool with a Vikings view of Europe map board. The game integrates the theme pretty well. The game even had a little bit of an epic Viking feel when I loading up my boat to sail to Iceland or Greenland or all the way to Rome. The game also gives out the Bloody Axe to the player that rapes and pillages the most towns and cities. You also get to roll dice when you're raiding an area.
However, the game falls flat like a Hagar cartoon in a number of areas. First there is little or no player interaction so it ends up Viking solitaire. To win this game you need victory points and the best way to get victory point is to play this game like a Euro. I won this game both times I played by collecting Saga cards. This means it's usually better to trade or settle vs. raiding territories. The Bloody Axe is cool but it's not really a good path to victory. I personally like Fire & Ice, not enough to buy the game but enough to play it a couple of times a year. Berserker rating = 2 1/2.
Midgard is basically a light weight abstract area control Euro. I say it is most similar to games like Mission Red Planet, El Grande or Web of Power. The board has three kingdoms with 3 or 4 provinces each. There are also 2 Viking Heaven spaces. In the game each player is dealt 6 cards and there is a pass the trash part of the game where you pass your cards to person on the left. Each turn you play a card that lets you do stuff like place 2 guys on the board, attack (displace 1 Viking), Viking hoard place 3 guys in 1 province or add 1 guy to the boat and move1 guy. There are a few real powerful cards that let you nuke one province or collect extra tokens. Like most Euro / area control game there is some benefit of spreading your guys out and getting in as many territories as possible and some benefit to concentrating your Vikings and winning territories. As you can image this game plays like a dry area control Euro.
On the plus side Midgard has a slightly dark and mythical feel like a strange Italian opera about a fat Viking women. This probably comes from the dark abstract playing board and something called Doom. Five random territories are Doomed each turn and all Vikings left in the Doomed territories are destroyed but you get to collect victory point because your Vikings died a glorious death as they are sent to Valhalla. I do like the darker feel of the game and the player interaction that you get in an area control game. However, I can only give this game a Berserker rating = 1.
It's a pretty sorry state that the highest Berserker rating I can give any Viking game is 2 1/2 out 5. I guess I'll have to continue my saga to find a game where I can take 8 Vikings wearing Fred Flintstone clothing and go Berserker and rape and pillage a strongly defended castle guarded by 20 Euro knights. Anybody have suggestions for a better Viking game?
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- Michael Barnes
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I like FIRE AND AXE a lot...it is very Euro, not very interactive, but it's a fun game. I've seen the Bloody Axe win games...you just have to go balls out for it and abandon everything else.
You might ought to check out the old SPI game RAGNAROK...
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Or shit, go all out and just take the theme of Erik the Viking . Sven the Berserker, Ys, Dragons, and Odin included.
First we're flying - now we're sinking!
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maverick.brainiac.com/cmm/tsr-h01.jpg
We played the hell of that game back in the day. It's technically a two-player game, but you can add more people by just dividing up the forces. I still wouldn't recommend anything more than four players.
Viking Gods is very light wargame treatment of Ragnorak, the final battle between the norse gods and their giant enemies. The norse gods win if they can kill Loki, and the bad guys win if they can chop down Yggdrasil. The gameplay is not very complex, and once a unit joins a battle, they are stuck until all adjacent enemies are dead. But the real fun of the game is Hela, who semi-randomly drifts around the battlefield like a D&D sphere of annihilation, destroying any units that she comes into contact with. In a typical game, the vast majority of units on both sides are killed. Heimdall in particular is doomed.
Of the games you mentioned, I have played the original version of that Fire & Ice Viking Saga (it had a different name, which I don't remember offhand), and I was the proud winner of the Bloodaxe award, and also came in second out of four players. If this game is a 2.5 (sounds ok to me), then I would rate Viking Gods as at least a 4.
Btw, I also owned that Knight and Viking set when I was a kid, and it was definitely one of my favorite toys. We liked to set up a shooting gallery, using building blocks to prop up partially concealed knights and vikings behind the metal castle walls, then shoot at them with Star Trek tracer guns. You know, the ones with the colorful little plastic discs for ammo. Later, in my teenage years, I cleverly hid my playboy and penthouse collection inside that old metal castle under my bed. My mom found them while I was in college, and promptly recycled them, then donated the castle to some toys for tots charity thing.
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The game definitely looks euro, but is about buidling viking fortresses (with different materials: grass, earth, wood, stone) and besieging those of others. Lots of direct conflict.
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- Michael Barnes
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No good. If they were built with hate, fury, blood, fire, pillage, and slaughter I think it'd be what KP is looking for. I don't want to be a grass gathering Viking.
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Two years ago I picked up Weapons and Warriors (Knights and Pirates) which comes with a plastic castle and soft plastic projectiles. I've had a good time play it with my kids and it seem a lot safer than the older Viking set.
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- Notahandle
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It's issue #8.
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After all this Viking talk, I may just have to stage a battle this weekend!
BillN
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Viking fortress sounds like an oxymoron. They were attackers, not defenders.
well maybe if only to defend against each other:
viking fortress gains 121.000 hits on google
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Big Lizard, your set sounds more like mine, which I think I got in 1975. Minty green vikings, gray knights, plastic towers for the four corners of the castle, but no catapults or boats. I honestly don't remember a drawbridge, but it's been a long time. I had forgotten about the towers until you mentioned them.
Thats exactly it! Minty green! How the hell did they pick that color for a bloodthirsty horde of rampaging Vikings?
And the drawbridge I guess was more like a small gate with a door hinged on the bottom.....um ...yeah, I guess that is a drawbidge!
BillN
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