Saga of the Northmen First Impressions

In Saga of the Northmen, you need to control Kingdoms to control other lesser but valuable regions.

You do this by land or by sea.

Europe of the Dark Ages was a treacherous landscape of shifting alliances, warfare, and betrayal. Among the most feared peoples of this time were the Northmen, who came from the lands of Scandinavia to pillage and conquer, without warning and without mercy. In time, the Northmen established their own kingdoms across Europe and came to dominate many more, gathering enormous wealth and establishing lucrative trade routes.

Saga of the Northmen Game Play

Players have a player board and hand of Infamy cards, Trade Route cards and some Influence tokens.

The game is played in 3 rounds of 3 phases: Rally, Marching, and Planning.

Rally Phase

This is all about players taking turns playing cards and resolving them to try and control Kingdoms.

They Play an Influence Card from their hand and Place Influence in the Kingdom shown on the card from their supply. They can also spend Infamy to Hire a Hero to put a Hero token into that region too.

If the Influence card has a region listed on the bottom, the player will Place Plunder, a yellow token, in that region. Then the player will Draw Influence Cards.

Marching Phase

This is all about resolving the board now players have spread Influence and Plunder all over it.

To Determine Control of the 7 Kingdoms, the player with the most pieces (Influence and Heroes) in each Kingdom keeps them there. The rest are removed from the board.

Then comes Kingdom Movement which is done from top to bottom of the track on the side of the board. Each Kingdom has a turn to move the influence within it into adjacent regions.

A player can pay infamy tokens to tactically delay this action for a Kingdom, activating that Kingdom on a second pass down the list.

When moving, players will look at the influence cards they played for that Kingdom. For each land card, they move influence to any neutral adjacent region over land. For each sea card, move the influence cube to any neutral region next to the sea anywhere on the map.

Land and Sea cards are denoted by the artwork which is cool.

Region Control

Once all Kingdoms have activated, players Fight Battles in all neutral regions with pieces from 2 or more players. Quite simply, if a player has the most pieces in a region, they win. Losers return all Influence cubes to their infamy card to use as infamy for future actions.

The winner will Collect Plunder tokens from regions they have Influence in.

Then players can Complete Trade Routes. A trade route is complete if this round they control the Kingdom at the top of the card AND have Influence in the region at the bottom of the card this round.

Now Clear Neutral Regions is ready for a new round.

Planning Phase

Starting with the start player and going clockwise once, players take 1 or both of these actions:

Draw Trade Routes – Spend 3 Infamy to draw 2, keep 1 and return the other to the bottom of the deck.

Hold Cards – Spend 1 Infamy per card in their hand they want to keep, discarding the rest.

Game End

The Game ends after 3 rounds

The player or players with the most unused Infamy Points in their supply receive a bonus. They get Plunder tokens equal to 1 + the number of Trade Routes they completed in this game.

Your score is equal to the number of Plunder Tokens you collected and the Plunder Value of any Trade Routes you completed. The highest score wins.

Theme

Yeah, I guess. I mean the names of places and the people etc are all real. Invasions like this in this time frame were commonplace so it makes sense to theme a game around it.

I liked building up a Kingdom, controlling it, and then raiding the nearby regions.

The way people move around on land and sea makes sense too. That’s quite unique I think.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is fairly quick once you know what you’re doing. There are things to place and cards to distribute but it’s not too hard.

The rulebook is OK. It’s clear in most places and has some examples but it didn’t answer all of our questions.

Components & Artwork

Everything is fairly average. The board, the cubes and everything are basic.

The art isn’t great but the detail is used as part of the gameplay and it works quite well. It’s quite drab but functional. I prefer substance over style personally so it’s fine by me.

Ease of teaching & Accessibility

Teaching isn’t easy. There are lots of things to go into. It’s a layered game where area control leads to the movement for more area control.

You have tokens that are moved from place to place and spent from different areas of your playing space and it can be confusing as to which tokens go where and when.

It’s accessible for experienced gamers, I wouldn’t play this with new gamers. It’s above the gateway level I think.

Saga of the Northmen Summary

This game is stuck in a bit of a hole when it comes to its competition.

It’s not as good-looking as games like Rising Sun and Blood Rage. No matter what you think of the gameplay of these games you have to admit they’re good-looking.

They’re both area control games of sorts like Saga of the Northmen.

When talking about area control games with cubes you have to mention El Grande. The literal ‘El Grande’ of area control games.

I have the Big Box and while I don’t play it as much as I like due to playing new stuff and the size of the box making it tough to carry, it’s the best one.

That’s one thing Saga of the Northmen has going for it. It’s MUCH more transportable than the 3 games I compared it to here and the gameplay is comparable to El Grande.

The Game

So this is a card-driven area control game. I like that you use the cards to control areas with the goal to control other areas. You’re looking at playing cards to place Plunder that is up for grabs by anyone. You need to make sure if you’re placing it, you’re claiming it.

There is plenty to think about there.

You place Influence hoping to control Kingdoms which is fine. It’s frustrating if you control a Kingdom but fail to control an adjacent region. But, luckily, you get them back as Infamy which you can spend on bonus actions.

This is really cool and calms the frustrations you can get with this kind of games.

This is a very good game with loads to consider on a turn, definitely recommend you give this a go.

Jesta ThaRogue

Note: The copy I played was a review copy generously provided by Minion Games, big thanks to them for this game.