Nidavellir Board Game First Impressions

Nidavellir has players bid for turn order to draft cards.

Will you get the one you want?

Nidavellir, the Dwarf Kingdom, is threatened by the dragon Fafnir. As a venerable Elvaland, you have been appointed by the King. Search through every tavern in the kingdom, hire the most skillful dwarves, recruit the most prestigious heroes, and build the best battalion you can to defeat your mortal enemy!

Nidavellir Game Play

TL;DR Players bid for turn order to draft cards into sets that score at the end of the game.

Theme

I mean, the blurb above makes it seem exciting but none of it comes out in gameplay. You could be drafting an Accapella group for all it matters.

Setup

I was eating while this was being set up so I missed a fair bit. The cards and coins need to go on stands which aren’t really needed.

The owner had mixed up expansion content with base game content and was separating it out I think?

Components & Artwork

The components are OK. Again, not entirely sure of the point of the stand, especially the coin one.

The art has a nice look, but I don’t like the actual dwarves themselves.

Ease of Teaching

This is a very simple game to teach. Everything is open information so just bid and pick a card.

Teaching the different special cards looks like an absolute nightmare.

Nidavellir Summary

Generally, I wouldn’t say I like auction games. Those where you lose what you bid (Bruxelles 1893 comes to mind) are the worst but those where you spend nothing and get nothing are dull.

Here you bid and you get something, but don’t lose anything. that’s a good feeling. You might not get what you want or need but you get a thing.

You’re not actually spending anything either. You’re basically gambling with values trying to get a higher pick. You can look at players’ play areas and see what they need and try and guess what they want, but it’s not easy.

You’re also gambling playing the 0 to get (probably) the last pick but you get to upgrade a token allowing you to ‘bid better’ later. It’s good to tactically use on a tavern that has nothing going for it and if you have a high tiebreaker, who knows, you may get 4th or even 3rd pick anyway.

But, there are too many special cards and not enough replayability. I would rather see a limited random selection available in a game so each game is different. This is always appealing to me, like Ethnos, where the races in the game change the game. It’s enough to excite me more to play it again.

Despite that, I really enjoyed this game. It has the Cascadia thing of it being a game I will always be open to playing, but won’t want to play enough to own it. But I do highly recommend it.

Jesta ThaRogue