Bloody Vikings

As I mentioned, when my friend visited last weekend (that friend would be "FKL," for those keeping score at home), we played a lot of board games. One of the ones he brought to introduce to me was Eketorp. In fact, he gave me the game to keep -- and I played it again this weekend with a new group.

In Eketorp, each player represents a group of Vikings trying to amass the raw materials to build the walls of a castle. You can go out to the fields and scavenge the materials available there, or assault the castles-in-progress of your opponents to pillage their materials. But not only the latter will lead to conflict with enemy Vikings. There are only so many resources available in the fields each turn, and if there aren't enough to satisfy the Vikings players have deployed to each section of the fields, they must fight back opponents until there are few enough survivors to divide the resources.

This game is quite a lot about trying to get into the minds of your opponents, as you do in Adel Verplichtet (or "By Hook or By Crook," or "Hoity Toity," whichever name you might know that game by) or Doge, or as in Puerto Rico on a different level. You plan your turns simultaneously, and reveal your plans all at once. You want to try to do the things none of your opponents will do. But trying to outthink them, you might overthink it, and find several players all rushing toward the same tactic they thought they'd get away with for free.

The game has gone over pretty well with everyone I've played it with so far -- including some friends that I wasn't sure would like it. It's been deemed to have "just the right amount of plotting" without getting overwrought, some interesting mechanics that aren't easily relatable to other games, and a pretty brisk play time. After just two plays, I'm not yet ready to pronounce it a stellar game, but I've certainly liked it both times, and it's the best new game I've tried in a while. And as you would expect in a game this dependent on judging your opponents' plans, the game plays quite differently depending on who you play with.

If you're a fan of any of the games I stretched to compare this to, you probably won't be disappointed if you check it out.

Oh, and for FKL's benefit -- "Purple Power" has fallen. Though the player who won our game last weekend did play again tonight, she failed to win. Tonight was a victory for my Vikings.