Reavers of Midgard

As a big fan of Worker Placement games, Reavers of Midgard caught my eye. With beautiful art and graphic design, a load of custom engraved dice, and cute boat meeples, I was definitely intrigued. However, after learning about their twist on the Worker Placement mechanic, I knew I had found a game for me. 

In Reavers of Midgard, you’ll play as an expeditious Viking crew represented by the dice you’ll collect, roll, store in your boat player board, and spend for resources and actions. You’ll choose from the various actions on the board, pillaging, recruiting, or fighting monsters for glory, to name a few. That fun twist I mentioned, though, is that regardless of whose turn it is and which action they choose, each player, in turn order, will have the opportunity to execute that action! And while you may find comfort in knowing you aren’t getting locked out of any particular action, they balance this out well with ordered bonuses for the active player (and usually the player directly following them).

Gameplay

Each turn the active player will choose an action on the board, placing their boat meeple in the space, and then each player in turn order will have the option of executing that action, collecting their bonuses where relevant. You can either spend some combination of resources (e.g. food, favor, action dice) for the specified rewards, or you can choose to “rest,” which offers a separate set of choices for different benefits. 

Choices range greatly from action to action:

• You can recruit a set of two Reavers, which will grant you new dice, an action upgrade, or an ongoing ability depending on how you choose to play each of them;

• You can trade with local villages, allowing you to collect more resources, again offering you a choice between four(!) different options;

• You can take to the high seas taking a chance on a random event deck and then battling it out with great sea creatures to (potentially) earn you a massive glory spike;

• You can raid villages to gather resources, upgrade you ship, boost your current victory point standing, or find yourself a nice artifact to enhance your capacity;

• Or finally raid keeps, to gain more resources and have a chance at collecting new scoring tokens, and/or begin a nice collection of various kinds of sets for end-of-game scoring.

All this to say that there is a great amount of meaningful decision-making throughout the entire game including during opponents’ turns, which certainly kept me engaged at all times. Beyond the Worker Placement mechanic, this game seems to have something for everyone - whether you are a conservative set collector, or a gambling dice roller, you’ll find any number of combinations to earn you glory and come out on top. I definitely recommend checking it out, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Reavers of Midgard is available now from our webstore.