I've played Svea Rike about half-a-dozen times since Christmas and enjoyed it. The cards are a minor pain to deal with the first time, but after that we found that the pictures and the headlines are sufficient prompt to understand the point of them. There are many cards, but many are variations on a far smaller number of key themes: once these are known, it is easy to guess the basic point of many of the cards.

I have prepared a crib sheet which I give to players to indicate the translation of all the cards - it is a couple of sides of A4 - I corrected the alphabetic listing of the cards given in the rules I was sent and shortened some of the literal translations to fit. I can mail postscript to anyone who wants it.

The main thing we have found is that it is very hard to score anything like the high scores indicated in the rules - most of our winning scores are in the 7-9 region, with a memorable 12 on one occasion. One needs a relatively peaceful set of neighbouring countries, particularly early on, to do really well. Storing success is also hard: cash is very volatile (a lot of hits on 1/2 cash on hand), while provinces and merchants are easily lost in wars (particularly the latter). The culture cards are the only thing which are comparatively safe, although there is always someone with a stupid grin and a match to torch your hard won third palace, or a plague to hit your struggling poets. To get significant sets of these you have to focus, be lucky about what is turned up and start collecting early.

Not a game destined for classic status, but definitely good fun with replay value. Oh, the 4 hour playing time is way over the mark for us - we play in 90 minutes to 2hrs, depending on the number of players and the number of wars (wars tend to be faster because everyone plays at once).

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