A New Game from the Ragnar Brothers I got a chance to play the new Ragnar Brothers game, Viking Fury, this past week. I enjoyed it quite a bit, as did the others at the table, I think. The game clocked in at about 2.5 hours, but that included teaching the rules and a slow start for the first few turns as we figured out our options. It's one of those "action point allocation games," with so many per turn to use. You load up stuff onto your longship at a home base (crew or goods to trade, depending on your plans), and then you sail out to ports, similar to Hansa (but no arrows to limit your direction), to do actions at them - trade, raid or settle. Those second two are "battle" actions that involve rolling dice, so there is a good dose of luck. But, having more crew increases your chances of success up to a point, as do action cards that add to the dice rolls. The Rune (action) cards are another luck element in the game. They essentially "break" rules. None seemed to be too powerful and they added a lot of flavor to the game. There are lots of ways to score, some coming during the game and others at the end, including some bonuses that can cause big swings in points. Being our first game, this was hard to predict. The only thing close to combat between players is in a few of the Rune cards. The combat is between players and the ports. It's actually a game of tactical planning and setting yourself up to swoop into a port ready to do an action there before another player. You can easily see what a player is capable of doing on his turn, but you can't be totally sure because of the action cards. There are some other really cool mechanisms in the game that involve the movement, and also the Saga cards, which each have a goal to be completed on them. The Saga cards drive the game along in a really clever way. There's a lot more to the game than I'm describing here. If I get the time, I'm planning to write up a full session report with more detail. I will warn the parakeets that this game is like the other self-published Ragnar games - a cloth board, plain ugly art, cardboard chits and some colored cubes. It ain't real purty but it gets the job done. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 8 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com