Northgard the video game came out a few years ago to much acclaim. It uses the concepts of real-time strategy classics from the 90s, such as Age of Empires and the settlers, alongside a slick modern sandbox approach. Players control Viking war bands to build villages and complete awesome tasks. They are incentivized to pursue greater and more powerful feats to achieve fame, such as killing beasts and crushing opponents. Now this RTS/adventure game hybrid has been given a passionate and evocative board game adaptation titled Northgard: Uncharted Lands (see it on Amazon).
To its credit, this tabletop game sits comfortably alongside its digital predecessor, but also stands independently on its own merit. Fans of the video game will discover the inspiration lovingly scattered throughout the various cards, miniatures and tiles.
Designer Adrian Dinu has created a striking board game that combines established systems with a fresh vision. You don’t need to be familiar with the original Northgard to enjoy this adventure, as the primary connection is in abstracting the core themes of exploration and scarcity.
As you control one of the asymmetrical clans, you focus on both exploring the new continent and developing its land. Tiles randomly reveal the vast landscape in a process that mimics the procedural generation of its ilk. You meet other players and discover wild fauna, encounters that often lead to outright conflict. It’s a violent and surprisingly thoughtful experience that feels right at home on the tabletop.
Uncharted Lands takes its main design influence from the classic tile-laying board game Carcassonne. You draw tiles from a stack and orient them around the expanding board to connect and define the expanding geographic boundaries. It’s my favorite mechanism of Northgard, because the regional boundaries are unpredictable and full of strange shapes. This is in stark contrast to most area control games, which have a very rigid, carefully designed map to promote balance and fuel conflict. Northgard is simply sublime in its freedom. It encourages aggressive exploration to foreclose territory by rewarding you with a slew of points.
The second major influence is the central deck building mechanism. Like the mega-hit Dominion of board games, your deck starts a humble and reliable engine to achieve the necessary core components of the game. Each turn, you play a card from your hand, allowing you to move across territory, recruit units, or construct buildings. Over the arc of seven rounds, your deck evolves and differs from your competitors.
The most striking thing about this aspect of play is that the cards you add to your deck are free. Most games require you to gather resources and weigh up your purchase options, often slowing down progress. In Northgard, you immediately get a card from the open market when you pass before the round. This helps speed up the game as it encourages players to pass early.
However, you have another option. Instead of drawing from the row of cards available to everyone, you can take an action mid-round to take a card from your hand and replace it with a clan-specific option. This provides a small but meaningful touch of asymmetry that complements your clan’s continued ability.
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Northgard: Uncharted Lands has an exceptional sense of softness. Actions are fast, the core mechanisms are simple, and there is a constant sense of accomplishment. Combat manages a bit of drama with a single dice roll on each side supplementing the unit strength. Everything here feels like it’s gotten just enough oomph without falling into complexity or complicated process.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Despite my admiration for the exploration and amorphous regions, the board often looks like a cluttered mess once it takes shape. Players will struggle to visually recognize the boundaries of an area, misinterpreting strategic bottlenecks and perhaps even leading to an unexpected attack from a neighbor. A pain point that is unavoidable, as the busy artwork on the tiles only obscures the important edges.
Northgard also loses some of its lead once the map is fully explored. When regions become static, all that is left is to fight for the scarce resources and continue the fight. This is functional, but the sense of wonder evaporates and what rushes to fill that void is slightly less interesting.
However, the designers recognized this. They try to ease the late game slump with the included Creature expansion. This adds neutral warriors such as wolves, draugr, and fallen valkyries. The cascading effects of stumbling upon these beasts are both awesome and horrifying. The benefit is that they enhance the dynamic sense of exploration, and over time they form an evolving board that remains wild and chaotic until the creatures are defeated.
The serious drawback is that these add a significant complication to the game process. With higher player counts, more tiles are explored and more creatures are encountered. This results in a game phase where everything stops as you watch each beast’s behavior, how they move and what effect they have. Some push you around, others stop resource production and the worst swallow your armies.
These creatures are an interesting addition. They almost feel like a necessary part of the game. But they are sometimes a nuisance and can lead to very skewed sessions where a player feels attacked randomly. There’s quite a bit you can do to control and herd these neutral entities – other than just fighting and killing them – but in my gaming sessions, the tactical considerations they needed were often elusive for less experienced players.
Despite the cumbersome collar condition, this is a grand design. With only two or three players, it manages to offer elements of the 4X genre in a short 60-90 minutes. With four or five participants, that stretches to two hours or more, but it still feels relatively lively and snappy due to the fast-turning structure.
Ultimately, the greatest achievement is capturing the contrast between wonder and scarcity of the digital Northgard. This is achieved not only through the struggle for fertile land as shaped by exploration and conflict, but also through the limitation of the size of the military. You have to feed your troops every round, which creates downward pressure on expansive armies and gives a natural boost to players who have taken a beating. This is also how it models the video game’s harsh winter season.
Even more intriguing, wonder and scarcity are modeled by the central deck building mechanism. While it cleverly allows you to put new cards on top of your deck so you experience their benefits immediately, you’ll spend several turns waiting for those juicy options to reappear in your hand, hoping for a beautiful combination. of skills to appear and present dramatic body. That act of patience is like watering a field of crops and then gnawing your lip while waiting for the harvest. When that bounty finally comes, sit up in your seat, beaming with light as you build a mighty fortress or launch a brutal offensive and claim what’s yours.
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