Episode 172: Reavers of Midgard

Reavers of Midgard is a 2 to 4 player worker placement game designed by J.B. Howell, with art by Yaroslav Radetskyi and published by Grey Fox Games in 2019.

In Reavers, players will lead a crew of vikings on missions to gain glory through battle, raiding, collecting treasure, and growing your crew. The basic action is simple: The active player will place their ship token in one of several action spaces on the board. Each action space provides different opportunities for scoring through some combination of set collection, direct award of points, treasure acquisition, and other options. The active player will take that action along with a bonus reward – generally, a resource or additional card or tile acquisition from the area. Then, in player order, each other player takes the same action, with the bonus being reduced or eliminated with each successive player.

Many of the actions require a cost in crew, here represented by various colored dice. These dice may be obtained a variety of ways, but when claimed they will be rolled and stored on the player’s player board with the resulting face visible. Different colored dice have different icons available, some of which are wild under certain circumstances, so players will always be looking for ways to add to their dice pool or find ways to modify dice to the face they need to take their desired actions.

Players may further modify the effect of actions through the placement of their Reaver cards. These will be collected at various points in the game and, when chosen, give the player several options. They will first use the Reaver to collect a number of crew dice for their pool as indicated on the card. Then, they may choose to sacrifice the Reaver to claim additional dice of whatever face they choose, to make the Reaver their leader which will grant a one-time resource bonus as well as determine which die face will become Wild, or use the Reaver to Specialize, tucking it under the player board in a space corresponding to certain action spaces on the game board. For the rest of the game, the player will gain a bonus when taking an action in that space as indicated in the Specialization section at the bottom of the Reaver card.

As players take actions they will score points throughout the game and advance accordingly along the point track. However, the lion’s share of points will be scored during the end game, where a variety of sets, artifacts, and objectives that players have collected over the course of the game will be resolved and scored. The game plays over six rounds, with the first player rotating clockwise each round unless a certain action is taken in the game to interrupt this. At the end of the 6th round, final scores are tallied and the winners recognized with great huzzahs and the clank of overflowing steins of mead.

02:07:10 – Review

02:29:00 – Ratings

ReRoll

02:36:40 – Tiny Towns * [Buy] – Alderac Entertainment Group; Designer: Peter McPherson; Art: Gong Studios, Matt Paquette;

Check out our original review for Tiny Towns during Episode 146.

Gameplay Photos

* Disclosure: These titles were received free of charge by the publishers or distributors. If you are interested in submitting a title for review, please read our Review Policy.

Show Notes

Banter

Plays

News

Reavers of Midgard

ReRoll

Gameplay Photos

Episode 304: Orloj – The Prague Astronomical Clock

Episode 303: Tag Team

Episode 302: Shackleton Base