The video game Northgard launched a few years ago to much acclaim. Uses concepts from 90s real-time strategy classics such as Age of Empires and the settlers, Along with a sleek, modern sandbox approach. Players control a Viking with his warband to build a village and carry out great missions. They are motivated to pursue greater and more powerful feats to earn prestige, such as slaying beasts and crushing enemy players. Uncharted Lands (see on Amazon).
This tabletop game can comfortably stand alongside its digital predecessor and has its own merits. Video game fans will find inspiration spread lovingly across a variety of cards, miniatures, and tiles.
Designer Adrian Dinu has created an outstanding board game that combines established systems with a fresh vision. You don’t have to be familiar with the original Northgard to enjoy this adventure. Because its main connection lies in abstracting his core themes of exploration and scarcity.
When you rule one of the asymmetrical clans, you focus both on exploring new continents and developing their lands. Tiles randomly reveal vast countryside in a process that mimics the procedural generation of its peers. You bump into other players, spot wildlife, and encounters often lead to outright conflict.
Uncharted Lands takes its primary design influence from the classic tile-laying board game Carcassonne. Pull tiles from stacks and place them around a growing board to connect and define expanding geographic boundaries. This is my favorite mechanic from Northgard in that the boundaries of the realm are unpredictable and full of weird shapes. This is in contrast to most area control games, which have very rigid and carefully designed maps to promote balance and encourage conflict. Northgard is simply sublime in its freedom. Encourage active exploration to close off territories and earn more points for doing so.
The second big influence is the core deck-building action mechanic. Much like the board game blockbuster Dominion, your deck starts a modest and reliable engine to achieve the core components you need to play. Each time you play a card from your hand, you can move territory, recruit units, and build structures. Over a seven-round arc, your deck evolves and diverges from your competitors.
The best thing about this aspect of play is that the cards you add to your deck are free. Most games often slow progress by hunting for resources and considering purchase options. At Northgard, you take a card from the face-up market as soon as you pass the round. This makes the game faster paced as it encourages players to pass faster.
However, there is another option. Instead of drafting from a row of cards available to everyone, you can spend an action mid-round to pick cards from your hand and replace them with clan-specific options. This creates a small but meaningful asymmetric touch that complements the clan’s ongoing abilities.
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Northgard: Uncharted Lands has an exceptional smoothness. The action flows quickly, the core mechanics are simple, and provide a continuous sense of accomplishment. Combat manages a bit of drama by rolling his one die on each side that compensates for the unit’s strength. Everything here feels empowered without getting bogged down in complexity and complicated processes.
It’s not perfect, though. Despite my admiration for exploration and the amorphous realm, the boards often seem a cluttered mess when they take shape. Players may struggle to visually find area boundaries, misread strategic chalk his points, or even lead to unexpected attacks from neighbors. It’s an inevitable sore point, as the busy illustrations on the tiles only further obfuscate important boundaries.
Also, if you fully explore the map, you lose some of Northgard’s advantage. Once a region becomes static, the rest just fight over scarce resources and pursue combat. It’s functional, but the sense of surprise evaporates, and anything that tries to fill that void isn’t very interesting.
However, the designers were aware of this. They’re looking to ease the late-game slump with the included creature expansion. The cascading effect of running into these beasts is both wonderful and terrifying. The upside is that it creates a more dynamic sense of exploration, creating a board that evolves over time that remains wild and chaotic until the creature is defeated.
A serious drawback is that they add a great deal of complexity to the process of play. This causes a phase of play where everything stops while you consider what each beast does, how it moves, and what effects it triggers. Some push you away, some stop producing resources, and the worst swallow your army.
These creatures are an interesting addition. They feel like necessary elements for play. However, they can sometimes become a burden and lead to very biased sessions where one player feels randomly targeted. There are quite a few things you can do to control and swarm these neutral entities – more than just fighting and killing them – but in my play sessions the tactical considerations they require are more of an experience It was often elusive to shallow players.
Despite the troublesome state of the board, this is the grand design. With just 2-3 players, and in as little as 60-90 minutes, he can deliver 4X genre elements. It takes 4 to 5 participants for more than 2 hours, but it feels relatively brisk because of the high-speed rotating structure.
Ultimately, its greatest achievement was capturing the contrast between wonder and rarity in the Digital Northgard. This is achieved not only through exploration and struggle for fertile land assembled through conflict, but also through limiting the size of armies. You must feed your troops each round. This puts downward pressure on the expanding army, allowing a natural boost to the hit player. This is also how we model harsh winter seasons in video games.
Even more intriguing, wonder and rarity are modeled through a central deck-building mechanic. With the ability to cleverly place new cards atop your deck, you’ll experience its benefits immediately, but wait for those juicy options to reappear in your hand before a fantastic combination of abilities emerges and presents itself. Expend multiple turns in hopes of a dramatic agency. That act of patience is like watering a field of crops and biting your lip while waiting for the harvest. , build mighty fortresses or carry out brutal attacks to claim what’s yours.
