“Drunk I was, I was over-drunk, at that cunning Fjalar’s.
It’s the best drunkenness when everyone after it regains his reason.”
~ Viking Saying
Players can either buy permanent buildings sitting in front of them (resource factories, resources containers, etc) or buy units, towers and special cards that improve their deck and offence/defence capacity.
The only way to win is by successfully attacking each other, and each attack involves interesting bluffing mechanisms in which the attacker doesn’t know the defence capacity of their opponent…
In Vikings Gone Wild each player is in control of a Viking Clan on a quest to score the most points.
Players start with a starting deck of Beer, Gold and Vikings… They also get a Level 1 Town Hall.
On a turn, like any deck builder, you play your cards, use effects and buy more cards etc
However, you may keep some of them back to use on other players’ turns… Then, when everyone has a turn the start player marker moves to the left and a new round starts.
So… Use Beer and Gold to buy cards and upgrade existing ones using the board that holds all the bits…
The board is BUSY with cards but the top row is your standard, ever-changing, row of cards to buy from.
The Red/Blue cards are to Attack/Defend, more on that in a bit.
Buildings
The White cards are buildings… They Produce Gold and Beer or provide a space to store it for future turns. Others have game abilities such as allowing you to draw an extra card at the beginning of your turn etc…
You can also pay the cost to upgrade your Town Hall. Your Town Hall limits the number of Building Types you have in play so eventually, you need to spend resources on it to upgrade so your village can expand.
You can attack the other player’s buildings using the attack cards mentioned earlier. You assign attack cards to players’ buildings, as many as you like. Once complete, that player may play defence cards to improve the defences of those buildings. If you attack successfully you score points depending on the number of different buildings you were able to attack. The same thing applies to repel those attacks too, defending gets you points.
A player can only be attacked once per round so once they have been attacked they gain a token to show this.
On your player board, you have 2 missions that give you bonus points when you do what they ask.
Also on the main board, you have 4 random end-game goal cards that you’re working towards to pick up those points.
Once a player hits the target number of points the game ends, you add the end game scoring, and most points win.
Vikings Gone Wild Positives
Very nice fun art and excellent components for Beer and Gold.
Good deck-building game alternatives with permanent cards and attacking other players. I have a few deck builders but nothing that does this kind of thing.
Missions and End Game Goals add to that ever-changing ‘Deck Building’ row of available cards to allow for a bit of replayability. Plus a bunch of expansions are on the way adding co-op and team play.
Not usually a fan of take that, but here attacking other players just gains you points so it’s something you want to do and try and prevent.
Negatives
Small about of stealing resources from other players which I’m not a fan of. (Although I realise it’s thematic)
Turns can be slow, with quite a bit of downtime.
Non-standard card sizes!
Vikings Gone Wild Summary
It’s very nice, but more plays are needed, expansions may help.
Jesta ThaRogue