“Gather your Viking crew in order to plunder seas and lands for glory!”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/170042/raiders-of-the-north-sea
Playing Time: 60-80 minutes
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Shem Phillips
Players: 2-4
Players play as a clan of vikings. They’ll head to town to try to amass the resources they need, and then use those resources to embark across the frigid waters in a series of raids on castles, keeps and monasteries, which earns them the victory points they need to win the game.
What makes Raiders of the North Sea so good is a unique two-part worker placement system. On each turn, players will pick up a worker from one location, and place it in another, which will effectively activate both locations. This makes for a much more interesting game than a worker placement game where spaces are simply blocked – a blocked space is an opportunity now! But it does create a new challenge of finding the best two-action combination you can do with the spaces that are open and full.
Raiders of the North Sea is the game that put Garphill Games on the map, and honestly it’s still one of their best ones. It’s a straightforward design with a simple twist that adds a ton of depth to the game, and yet is still familiar enough that a game teach is done in less than five minutes and a table that knows what they’re doing can be done in less than an hour. Raiders will be in my collection for a long time.
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