Blood Rage Review

Blood Rage Review

Overview -

My second review is another kickstarter game, Blood Rage which is a Norse Viking themed board game designed to Eric M. Lang and produced by Cool Mini or not.  In essence it is a euro style worker placement type game with a few twists and differences.

Components -

Another CMON game means of course a hefty price tag due to it containing fantastically sculptured miniatures.  From the basic Viking 'troops' of the game who for rank and file are very detailed to the leaders and the monsters that you can bring along, I don't think there's a single model in the game I was disappointed with.

The board and other components are also very pretty, it has beautiful art work on the board its self and the team cards, though mainly functional also look good and have things in all the right places. There are tokens for all the things you would expect there to be tokens for and these parts are all made from quality thick card.

Just like a similar game that I reviewed recently, rum and bones the game uses plastic base covers to differentiate between the clans, these have to be added and removed quite often, especially on the monsters who switch players per game and have the same issue, getting them on and off without damaging the model, you really have to be careful here not to damage them as you switch them around.

The rulebook is clear (plus very pretty art wise) and only has a few ambiguous rules that need looking up online, thankfully the forum is well visited by others with the same questions and you can get an answer quite easily.

Gameplay/How it plays -

It is the time of Ragnarok! which to non Norse fans basically means the end of the world.  The game is set on a board containing several different regions.  Through the course of 3 rounds, regions of the board will explode reducing the play area available.  As this happens players, taking control of a clan of Vikings will need to pillage the areas on the board to gain strength enough fight their way through various means to earn glory and as such points that will win that player the game.

In blood rage there are several ways to win, each one themed around different Norse gods such as Loki, Thor, Odin etc.  Each god promotes different strategies that you can build around, Loki for example grants glory for dying as much as possible, others want you to purely die in Ragnarok and then for every Viking that goes to Valhalla (Viking heaven) at the end of the turn they return to the board granting victory points for doing so.

Of the 3 phases of the game, each one has a small deck of cards that gets steadily more powerful to make the game feel like it is progressing and becoming more intense as it goes on, in that deck you will get things like upgrades for your basic troops, upgrades for your leader, upgrades for your ship, gives you quests, monster summoning cards and battle buffs (these act a bit like magic the gathering instant spell buffs, if you have ever played that they are like giant growth that purely increases the strength of a creature for just that attack).

At the beginning of each phase the deck of upgrades is drafted between the players to help you theme your deck to a certain play style around a particular god or pair of gods.  Then each turn as one of your actions you can play the upgrade cards to buff your units.  Units are then placed on the board at the cost of the games mana style known as rage, you essentially pay x amount of rage to put a unit in and then when you run out of rage you cant play anymore units until it resets next round.

You can then choose to pillage regions at which point other clans can fight you for it, resulting in a battle at which point both sides may use the battle upgrade cards to secretly buff their clans.  After the dust settles if the attackers win they get the pillage bonus and increase the stat matching the card on the board for that region.

Rage can be increased by said pillaging and other game effects, leading as you progress to more troops being played each round.  In addition to this there is also a cap on the number you can actually put into play at any one time, which like rage can be increased also. Finally the 3rd stat that can be increased is a bonus to exactly how many points you get for winning a battle.

Once 3 rounds of mayhem, pillaging and destruction are complete, everyone totals up their score from the Euro game ring around the board and the winner is the person with the most glory.

Conclusion -

I have to say I really like Blood rage, it has a lot of depth and different ways to build each clan, even though they start identical to each other than in art work you can build each one differently depending on the cards you draw and strategy you decide to play.  It isn't without flaws here though because if you draw badly it could end up affecting you for the entire game.

For the most part the game is smooth, each turn is quite quick and is very easy to pick up and learn, our gaming group had it nailed down after just 1 game turn, yet it has a feel of an 'easy to learn difficult to master' type game just because of the card play archetypes having so many different options to them.

As I detailed above, everything is pretty components wise so there's very little complains in that area, it's a joy to play with such nice models and a detailed board.  

In our group with had about 10 games and were still raring for more, as each game plays differently we all won and lost several times each, it didn't seem an easy game to dominate for any game group. When players started ganging up on each other or developing grudges following a particularly brutal move by one clan to wipe out another it threw the games even more into the air of not knowing who would win.  In one of our games exactly that happened resulting in a quite amusing stand off each round of them beating each other up while the others tried to work around it.

The balance seems fairly spot on for each god's victory condition though the tough part can be getting all the pieces of the puzzle for your specific strategy.  All it takes is another player deciding he wants to switch to your win condition and both of you will struggle, this is a bit like a draft in many other games and is caused by there only being a small number of players.  The only other options is to not draft at all and just deal out cards, sadly that's more a case of get what you are given and no-one at that point has a solid win condition unless they get lucky on the deal.

Apparently the game plays like a board game called Kemet, however I have never played that so don't know if that is true, though if you have that might be a good baseline for you to work against for a comparison.

I would recommend this game, if you can get over the cost and like the Viking theme (who doesn't like Vikings they are up there with pirates and ninjas!) then its a solid quality well made game with many hours of replay value in it.

Happy Pillaging!