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× Talk about Eurogames here.

Viking Quest the 33 year saga to find a game where I can go Berserker

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11 Feb 2008 21:49 #2463 by KingPut
For me 1974 was the year of the Vikings. 1974 was the year Fran Tarkington lead the Minnesota Vikings to the Super Bowl. It was the year I wrote a book report on Leaf Erickson and Eric the Red. It was also the year that Santa brought me one of my favorite gifts of all-time, the Knights and Vikings battle set. With this set I received a metal castle, 20 army men sized knights and a catapult. Meanwhile, the Viking side had a Viking ship, 8 Vikings and a catapult. As a clueless 3rd grader, I didn't think this was fair. I asked an adult how could 8 Vikings dressed liked Fred Flintstone defeat 20 Knights in full armor behind a metal castle. This is when I learned about the how the Vikings could go Postal or something called going Berserker and kill and rape a bunch of Euro Knights trying to get favors from King Philip. That changed everything for me. For the next year whenever I played anything at some point in the game I would decide to go Berserker. This worked great playing football, foosball, Risk or Rock'em sock'em robots. However, it didn't work to well when playing mastermind or mystery date with Uba.

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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12 Feb 2008 09:27 #2497 by Michael Barnes
Now see, King, here was your chance for fame and glory. You could have posted a Viking Games report and submitted it as an article. We would have published it and your name would be in lights.

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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12 Feb 2008 10:07 #2504 by Chapel
It's definitely an under utilized theme. There are a few euro-ized Viking themed games, but they are so abstracted out, they don't realy count. FIRE and AXE really didn't capture the feel for me of the Viking culture. What I would like to see is a mix between Blackbeard and A Game of Thrones . I like the ship control of blackbeard, it may be too much for the Viking longboats, as there wasn't much navel combat. You could also add some mythological elements to spice it up a bit. A little ragnorok. Or just keep it historically correct.

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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12 Feb 2008 14:19 #2539 by KingPut
I thought about going for the fame and glory but I've been keeping a low profile playing Ticket to Ride every day waiting for a phone call from Alan Moon with his invite to the Gathering of Friends. No, you're right Vikings deserve a top billing rather than being buried under the Euro category. Next time I'll submit something like this as an article.

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12 Feb 2008 16:55 #2565 by Shellhead
You need to track down a copy of Viking Gods, an old TSR pocket game that they published back around 1980 or so:

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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12 Feb 2008 17:50 #2573 by jur
Queen Games rereleased Eketorp at Essen last year.
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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12 Feb 2008 19:03 #2575 by Michael Barnes
about buidling viking fortresses (with different materials: grass, earth, wood, stone

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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12 Feb 2008 22:05 #2584 by Shellhead
Viking fortress sounds like an oxymoron. They were attackers, not defenders.

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13 Feb 2008 04:03 #2620 by KingPut
Shellhead, that's funny that somebody else actually owned the Viking set with the old cut yourself on the sharp edges metal castle. We used a small tight rubber band on the catapult so it was possible to shoot a marble (with knock your eye out velocity across the room). Using the more effect hard marble as a projectile helped the Vikings out because a direct hit on the metal castle shook the castle knocking over half the knights (which counted as a kill). Unfortunately, my Viking set never made it puberty so I didn't get the chance to use it to hid Playboys.

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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13 Feb 2008 04:06 #2621 by KingPut
Malloc's brother owns Fire & Ice so we'll have to get it on the table soon. As I said I enjoyed playing Fire & Ice. The game really doesn't have any flaws. It just that it falls short of being a great game. The low interaction issue was one issue we mentioned. The other thing that would help would be variable character or family abilities or even if everyone started at the same low level Viking over time you could improve or modify your ability. Abilities could be increasing ship carrying ability, better trading ability, increased speed, berserker ability, etc. The cards in the game give players a one time bonus but I think permanent abilities help to add richness to games. I like games like Prophecy where your character can take a life of their own based on the abilities and objects they collect during the game. The same is true of Civilization games like Ti3 where the start racial abilities and the technology you acquire help to give your race personality and shape the way you play the game. That way one game you could play Ragnar Lodbrok family and focus on raping and pillaging Paris and France. The next game you can play Leaf Ericson family and focus on making long journeys to discover Greenland and America.

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14 Feb 2008 18:56 #2791 by Notahandle
One of the Ares magazine games was Ragnarok, though I can't make any comments as I don't remember much about it.
It's issue #8.

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14 Feb 2008 22:09 #2798 by BigLizard
1974 was about the same year I received a Knights and Viking set from Santa. My set also had a metal castle with drawbridge, towers, and razor sharp edges. Mine didn't come with a boat or catapult, but I did get about 50 light green plastic Vikings, about 30 gray plastic Knights, and three horses. I still have the figures in a box mixed in with my plastic dinosaurs (wouldn't THAT make a great AT game!) but the castle got trashed years ago.

After all this Viking talk, I may just have to stage a battle this weekend!

BillN

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14 Feb 2008 22:31 #2801 by Shellhead
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.

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15 Feb 2008 17:51 #2847 by jur
Shellhead wrote:

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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15 Feb 2008 22:09 #2861 by BigLizard
Shellhead wrote:

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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