Vikingatid ("Time of the Vikings) is designed by Johan Pahlén, Kim Bergström and Fabian Fridholm and produced by Trollspel. The same firm also have an RPG called Viking. The boardgame is a historical wargame on the strategic level, so I could not resist buying it. On my vacation I sat down to play a (solitaire) 6 player game.
The counters and board are of good quality wargaming type - with a lot of each type and the usual Europe, Middle east North Africa layout, also with Greenland and some parts of North America. Suitable to the gaming scale it has areas, not hexes and the areas have the names presumably used by the Vikings. The game uses 10-sided dice. It runs in 14 (or less) 25-year rounds, starting in the year 800.
At the beginning of each round you buy ships, either koggs (for trade) or longships (for war) then you dice for initiative, and the winner sends out either a trading party or a war party. The trading party goes to an area on the board where it trades. This is achieved by taking away one ship and gains the trading value of the area (shown by a number of coins) to the player's treasury. You can also establish a trading camp on a chosen level (up to the area's trading value) by taking away 2 ships per level. Then you go on to the next area until you run out of ships. When reaching an area you dice for attrition against the sum of the attrition values of areas traversed (usually 2 per area visualised as number of sea dragons on sea and dragon heads on land). As in real life, these journeys are precarious. The first round you start with 5 pieces of silver to buy five ships and when going directly from Southern Norway to Normandy you may lose 4 of them to attrition.
The war party works in a similar way, except when you reach your destination you fight the local forces (shown as shields wearing a number signifying civilisation level and fighting strength. The fight is by simultaneous dicing one for each ship killing one opponent if you dice below your level. If you outlast the locals you can plunder, earning money if the area is sufficiently civilised and/or establish war camps (in accordance with the trading camps' procedure).
Camps
You establish camps for two reasons. You may start your ships in any corresponding type of camp, two ships for each level. Also, a friendly camp breaks the chain of attrition, so you can dice for attrition so far, and then start refreshed for the rest of the journey. Second, when you have both a trading camp and a war camp at the highest possible level in the same area (corresponding to the number of coins and shields) it is considered conquered by you and give victory points. Of course if you lose some level of camps, you have to reconquer.
Anyway, when your party has run out of ships, there is another dicing for initiative and this goes on until no one has any more ships left to send out. Added to this is a module of home politics. At the beginning of the game you decide if you are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. At the beginning of each round you get 5 pieces of silver from home trade and at the end of each round you pay half of your earnings to the Treasury. Then the King takes half of it and you and your countrymen players share the rest. Good news for you if you earned less then the others, and still better news if you are the king - which you can be by winning a dicing election, influenced by the number of camps you have scattered all over Europe, and by the spending of Silver, of course. All the actions mentioned can be influenced by cards. There are a lot of them and they are given out to each player one at the start of each round (plus 3 at game start) so they will probably not all be used in one single game.
The earning and spending of silver is important, but you win by accumulating victory points each round and they are earned from the trade value of conquered areas, from being King and from discovering the lands in the west (Iceland, Greenland and the Americas). For the last you need to play special discovery cards and then to reach them with a fleet.
None of these game mechanics are exactly innovations. Most interesting is perhaps the "Empire reaction phase". If camp(s) have been established in certain organised states - England, the Holy German Empire (which in the spirit of Charlemagne includes France), Byzantium, West and East Caliphate and Khazaria - their reaction is decided by (you guessed) a die roll. Most likely such an Early medieval colossus will do nothing, for example, peace, but if the dice says war, all camps in the area are wiped out. It can also be "geld" and your camps are bought out. The reaction becomes more severe the more war camps you have (at least if I interpreted a terse phrase correctly). You can forego this throw by conquering all areas in for example England, but Byzantium and German empire have a core area where Viking war parties cannot go so they cannot be eliminated. The same goes for Rome, so the world is made safe for Christianity. (It should reasonably apply at least for the Caliphates too, but it does not).
The endgame problem is solved rather smoothly: the game is over when every player's side is converted to Christianity. This is checked by each player throwing a die for conversion each round, starting in 900 and with the probability rising each round. Thus the game may end this round, but it may also go on until 1100. To become Christian does not change much for the Vikings, presumably they go to church on Sundays but they trade and plunder as usual. The Christian empires do not attack their camps as often though, but on the other hand is introduced a risk to lose the camps by integration with the local population (the Vikings stop taking a bath each Saturday?).
As a simulation, do the game-winning strategies make sense historically. In the game I played the winning "player" sides followed either the "Norwegian" strategy - island hopping through the North Atlantic (Orkneys etc.) to Ireland - or the "Swedish" strategy - conquering areas along the rivers of eastern Europe. However the followers of a historical "Danish" strategy - going for the tasty morsels in England and the French coast - failed miserably. Given the count of victory points - a conquest of say Gotland (in the Baltic) or Hjaltland (the Shetlands) will bring you one point per round adding up to 14 points if the game continues to 1100. Conquest of Normandy will bring you 4 points each round, but given the risk of empire reaction, and the risk of malicious card being played by other players on such a gem, you will seldom get these VP's in before your Vikings are dispatched from the area. There is no comparable mechanism for areas in Eastern Europe or Scotland in this game (except the malicious cards!). However, as the rule book gives thanks to "play testers all over the country" maybe other people have found means to handle this. Maybe a few rounds of massive trading in these areas will give money to build huge war fleets that conquer so many areas that at least some will remain for a round or so, giving, 3-4 points each. Perhaps also a co-operative effort by 2-3 players to conquer all English areas would work. These are strategies I have not tried.
The strong differentiation between trade and war parties is nice as it implies that the Vikings did not spend all their time robbing churches and raping nuns. However, I am not sure that these pragmatic entrepreneurs kept such a firm line between these spheres of activity during their travels.
The rules are mostly well laid out (though sometimes badly spelled) - in Swedish, of course. They are not watertight. Examples of omissions or doubtful points:
- There is the old double-coast problem - if you come from one sea area to trade or fight in one area that borders on many sea areas, you then must continue directly into the same sea area. But if you establish a camp and next round you place ships there, can they start into any of the bordering sea areas? This problem is not addressed in the rules.
- Neither is attrition when moving from one land area to another by way of rivers - if you start in one area and stop in the next, from what areas do you count attrition points. Also, an important rule that says that you must have an extra Empire reaction die roll each time you create a camp or a new camp level, is mentioned in the section of "Empires" but not in the section of establishing camps. It is also unclear what it means to "discover" a new area. If you reach it and all your ships are immediately wiped out by attrition, can you still count VP's?
So what about play value? Is it fun? Myself, if the theme is right, I am perfectly happy to find out if the next campaign to build a 3 level war camp in Friesland will succeed where the earlier 4 failed. but for those less gregariously inclined of you out there play may seem repetitious after a few rounds. And as you may have already gathered there is a lot of dice in the air almost all of the time!
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© Copyright 1998 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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