Fight your opponents and take control over the towns to prove your Viking clan is worthy of ruling them all!
1-4 players, ages 14+
Playing time: 30-60 minutes
Designer: Carl Chudyk
Artist: Radosław Jaszczuk
Publisher: Czacha Games
https://czachagames.pl/
Now live on Kickstarter:
Blood of the Northmen is a game that combines tile placement with area control.
On your turn, you’ll add a tile to the map, with the sides of the tile determining your actions for that turn: Each forest side allows you to add a new warrior to that tile, lakes and roads allow you to move, and mountains allow you to start fights.
You’ll also be using those same tiles during fights, as mountain sides can also be used to add strength. Players will battle each other to take control over the towns, next to the player winning the fight also scoring a point.
The game ends when a player manages to collect 6 victory points, or when a player ends his turn with at least one warrior in each of the 4 town types.
There are also 2 optional modules to play the game with, Strongholds and Commodities, for more advanced gameplay.
The game comes with thick cardboard tiles, but some things of the production could’ve been better: the different types of towns are hard to distinguish from each other and the miniatures are pretty small and all in the same colour, and the difference can be hard to tell. It would have helped a lot if the miniatures would be bigger, or if they would come in different colours.
The action-selection mechanism is very original: you don’t just place a new tile matching the landscapes you place next to, the edges of the tile also determine the actions you take. The mountain sides can be used as wilds but also gain you strength during fights, so you definitely have to think when you want to use them. It’s a very nice take on tile placement that I haven’t seen in any other game before!
Blood of the Northmen was successfully funded during a Kickstarter campaign back in 2019. At this moment the game is on Kickstarter again, together with its first expansion ‘Test of Faith’: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/429029786/blood-of-the-northmen-and-test-of-faith-expansion
Tabletopping 