Champions of Midgard is a viking themed worker placement game, which means we can't help but compare it to Raiders of the North Sea, especially since we picked up both games within a few months of each other. Apart from the obvious similarities, however, the two games couldn't be more different.
For the most part, Champions is a more traditional worker placement game. Each player gets a set number of workers, which they use to compete over common spaces on the board. Spaces are a mixture of resource gathering and opportunities to fight monsters such as trolls, giants, draughr, and dragons, which is the primary way to score victory points. Players use their workers to recruit warriors (represented by dice) and supplies which are needed to travel to far off monster-infested lands.
An interesting wrinkle on the "use resources to fulfill quests" theme is blame, a currency in the game that subtracts from a player's score. One of the spaces on the board is the Troll, and the player who successfully fights the Troll each round gets to give a blame token to another player, and get rid of one of his own if he has one. If no one fights the Troll, every player gets a blame token. Blame tokens are worth negative points at the end of the game in a somewhat exponential manner: one blame is -1 point, 2 is -3 points, 3 is -6, 4 is -10, and so on, so managing blame becomes a critical part of the game's strategy.
Warriors are represented by dice which are rolled to combat monsters. The different types of warriors are not necessarily better or worse than each other; sword- and spearmen provide some defense, allowing you to play it safe, while axemen tend to do more damage but provide no defense, meaning that more of your warriors will be killed in combat.
There's a fair amount of variety as far as what you can choose to focus on in the game, and this is guided to some extend by Destiny cards, which grant extra points at the end of the game for accomplishing goals such as having killed the most of a particular type of monster, or having the most gold or food left over at the end of the game.
It's a little more involved than Raiders of the North Sea, and a lot more fantastical, to the point that I think it has more in common with Lords of Waterdeep than any of the more historical viking games like the North Sea series. It is definitely sufficiently different that we play both games fairly often, sometimes even in the same weekend.
Rating: 5 (out of 5) A good mix of worker placement and dice rolling, with a fun theme and some neat twists you won't find in other games of this type.
An interesting wrinkle on the "use resources to fulfill quests" theme is blame, a currency in the game that subtracts from a player's score. One of the spaces on the board is the Troll, and the player who successfully fights the Troll each round gets to give a blame token to another player, and get rid of one of his own if he has one. If no one fights the Troll, every player gets a blame token. Blame tokens are worth negative points at the end of the game in a somewhat exponential manner: one blame is -1 point, 2 is -3 points, 3 is -6, 4 is -10, and so on, so managing blame becomes a critical part of the game's strategy.
Warriors are represented by dice which are rolled to combat monsters. The different types of warriors are not necessarily better or worse than each other; sword- and spearmen provide some defense, allowing you to play it safe, while axemen tend to do more damage but provide no defense, meaning that more of your warriors will be killed in combat.
There's a fair amount of variety as far as what you can choose to focus on in the game, and this is guided to some extend by Destiny cards, which grant extra points at the end of the game for accomplishing goals such as having killed the most of a particular type of monster, or having the most gold or food left over at the end of the game.
It's a little more involved than Raiders of the North Sea, and a lot more fantastical, to the point that I think it has more in common with Lords of Waterdeep than any of the more historical viking games like the North Sea series. It is definitely sufficiently different that we play both games fairly often, sometimes even in the same weekend.
Rating: 5 (out of 5) A good mix of worker placement and dice rolling, with a fun theme and some neat twists you won't find in other games of this type.
- Champions of Midgard official website
- Champions of Midgard on BoardGameGeek
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