Origin Story Years ago I had the honor of playing a game called Champions of Midgard and although I liked it, I didn’t think I really needed to own it. Then the brother of that game popped up on Kickstarter titled, Reavers of Midgard. Now the title instantly grabbed my attention but as I looked it over I eventually decided to pass on backing it primarily because I just thought it was going to have too many similarities to Champions of Midgard. Well, Reavers is finally hitting shores and retail outlets and it popped up on my radar again recently and after looking it over I finally pulled the trigger and picked me up a copy, primarily due to the vibrant colors on the game board itself, (I go wild for vibrancy). So after playing a few games what did I think of it and how does it compare to Champions of Midgard? Read on reading to get the answers to these pressing questions plus many more! Overview of Gameplay In Reavers, players will be leading their very own Viking horde raiding keeps and villages, trading with the locals, subduing lands and of course recruiting even more Viking hordes to make all of the above easier. To accomplish all of these feats players will take turns placing their cool little wooden ship meeple on a specific action space on the game board. Once placed the player will pay whatever costs are associated with that space, such as food or particular dice and then take the action which will reward the player with glorious goodies. So, all that sounds like pretty standard worker placement fare eh? And for the most part it really is, HOWEVER the nice twist to this is that when a player places their ship and takes the action, each OTHER player can also take that same action if they also pay the required fee. The big difference is that the main player here gets a bonus attached to the action whereas everyone else gets a lesser bonus or none at all depending on player order. Not only that but as you start gaining more and more Viking cards to join you, you can slot them under specific spots on your personal player board. Now, whenever anyone takes that particular action on the main game board, you also get a bonus that is listed on the slotted Viking cards. Around and around this will continue with each player placing and taking actions until each player has placed their ships on the board then any cards remaining on the board that were not gobbled up are discarded and the entire board it refreshed with new cards drawn from their respective decks. Players collect their ship meeples and then a new round begins. Players will do this for 6 rounds and then at the end will calculate their total VP’s which in this game are called “Glory” (of course), and whoever has the most glory wins! Components/Game Board As I mentioned above the game board itself is what drew me back to the game and let me tell you it is a gorgeous board. The main board has placings outlined for each of the card decks and special spots for the card placements. If you flip the game board over you can play a 2 player game with slightly altered setup. The individual player boards are of a nice thickness and sturdy and have spots dedicated for dice and your leader card. They also represent you ship that you are using to sail to various places on the board to raid and trade so it adds a nice theme to it as well. The dice, and hoooo boy are there a lot of dice, are REALLY nice. There are bookoos of blue, red and yellow dice all with nice unique emblems etched into the sides and a few black battle dice as well. They have a nice weight to them and look very vivid and colorful like most everything else in the game. The cards have a nice premium feel to them as well and have the standard card size as well as the mini size. The rest of the components in the retail version are pretty standard cardboard pieces and nothing to crow over and there are quite a few of them. I do like the cool little wooden ship meeples player’s use for their placement pieces. Aside from the dice those are my fav pieces in the game. Oh, one other thing that kinda bugged me was the Glory point tracker tokens for each player. They are just basic little round pegs, would have been super nice to at least print "100" on one side of each of them to notate when a player surpasses that illustrious 100 point spot on the track. Just a small touch but would have made a world of difference. Box/Storage There is a plastic insert with the game but mehhhhhh. I always enjoy a good insert but this one just squeals meh to me. There are spots to hold the cards which is always welcome so I don’t have to bag them up BUT there is just one other big gap for everything else so you HAVE to bag all the tokens up. And you will want to bag the tokens up individually unless you just want a giant pile of various tokens to scrounge through every time you play. No good spots to store the dice either so those will all have to be bagged up. And even after you bag up everything there is a specific spot to put the player boards but the amount of tokens that are bagged bulges those up a bit so the board that sits on top of that doesn’t sit even. And even after all that there is still a bit of a gap between the board and the lid so if storing the game on its side, you might run into a bit of a card mess from them not being secure in the insert. Overall, not a huge fan of the insert included with the game although the box itself is nice and has some great artwork adorned on all sides…….Except for the sides on the bottom box where there are random advertisements for more games……ugh. I always hate seeing advertisements on boxes as it just kills the beauty of the game. Visual Appeal /Theme Visually the game is amazing! The colors on the board are very pleasing to the eyes and the artwork throughout is just incredible. The dice all look incredibly nice as well with each being very easily distinguishable. The artwork on the Viking cards themselves is very well done and I find myself actually inspecting each new card I acquire closely to see all the fine details. The board’s art is also very finely crafted with little hints and tugs of the eyes all about. Even though I love they have outlined the spaces for the decks and cards on the board, I find myself attracted to the 2 player side as it allows a better view of the board itself with less deck outlines. Those beautiful castles and villages sprawled all over the landscape are a marvel to behold. I think they did a really good job integrating the theme with the gameplay here. I mentioned it earlier but your player board is your ship which can be upgraded to more easily handle ship battles. It holds your leader Viking card on the ship itself which is neat and all the other Viking cards you acquire go under the edge of the ship to kinda show that they are also passengers. There are also interesting choices to make within the game that adds to this. For example when you “Raid Villages” you get to pick a combo of two cards with glorious items aplenty. BUT on some of those cards there are extra choices of stuff to take accompanying a negative thing. So, you could JUST raid the village and take what you need OR you can take that AND pillage the village acquiring even more goodies……with a cost of a terror token which is worth negative points at the end. This kinda stuff really enhances the overall theme of the game. Rulebook This is so very close to being a good rulebook. It’s got a good setup and design and is colorful and has picture examples and full page component lists and does a pretty good job of explaining what is there……BUT there are so many missed rules pieces that I did have to visit the forums more than a few times to get clarification on a number of things. And most of the stuff that was missed is pretty standard stuff that you would think would have been caught if the rulebook was read through and tested by an outside party that didn’t design the game. Overall not a terrible rul
