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Over the course of six rounds, each player builds a tableau of islands and populates them with figures of various colors, with all the blue guys on the bottommost islands, the yellow guys on the row above this, and so on. Did vikings segregate their people in this manner, carefully allocating no more than one person per island section? Probably not, but I'm no viking expert, so let's move on.
You acquire these figures and island tiles in paired sets, and this is the design hook that drives the gameplay and most of your decisions. At the start of a round, you draw twelve figures from a bag — with the figures coming in six colors and thirteen of each being used in the game — and you place them next to a bidding wheel with values 0-11, placing first the blue figures next to the 0, 1, etc., then the yellow, greed, red, black and gray figures. You also take twelve tiles from a stack and place them next to the values, with the island tiles — each showing the left, middle or right side of an island — starting from 0 and going upwards while the ship tiles start from 11 and go downwards. Thus, you now have twelve figure-tile pairs, each with a price from 0 to 11.
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Dudes and tiles up for sale (Image: Tom Delme)
On a turn, a player must buy one of these pairs, but she can't buy the lowest valued pair — that is, the pair costing 0 — unless either (1) it's the only pair with a figure of that color or (2) the player has no money. (You can trade victory points for money, but the ratio stinks, so you don't want to do that unless you're desperate.)
You then place the island in your tableau, but the placement must make sense so that you don't have water abutting land or a tile floating in the middle of empty space. Here is where you get to be a viking (sort of) and pretend you're sailing around discovering stuff. "Hey, here's a new island! Hey, here's the other half of that island that we first discovered a couple of turns ago!" If you placed the island in the row appropriate for that figure, you can then place the figure on that tile; otherwise you place the figure in the northwest corner of your board to await a competent boatswain (the gray figures) to escort it somewhere. If you took a ship tile instead of an island, then you must place it in the top row, with that ship representing other vikings who have come to attack you.
Once all the figures of a color have been removed, you spin the bidding wheel until the counterclockwisemost yellow figure (or green or red...) is on the 0, lowering the price of all the remaining pairs.
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Mid-game board with lots of guys needing a lift
So you need blue figures to feed your vikings at the end of the game (as hunger costs you points) and yellow figures to earn money so that you can can buy what you want instead of getting stuck with garbage and green and red figures to score points so that have a chance of winning and black figures to protect all of those dudes from being attacked and gray figures to get them onto the islands to do all of that because you're not likely to be able to place them on the islands directly in the first place, especially if your opponents are paying attention and sticking you at the same time that they buy what they need.
In short, you need everything, but you can't possibly get it all because you don't have enough money. More importantly, you're not the only one buying things, so that black warrior figure or left island tile you desperately need won't stick around for long. Maybe you just need to shell out a lot of money for it right now. No, really, go ahead and do that, and I'll just have to satisfy myself with this cheap goldsmith that will supply me with even more coins in the rounds to come.
Situations like these play out again and again, especially with four players at the bidding wheel because then you're purchasing only three(!) pairs of tiles and figures each round, giving you few shots to get what you need, especially if you're money-poor, which you almost always are. With two players, the game turns Nim-like, with me spending 2 for a yellow figure (instead of 1 for a blue) because I don't want to give you the chance to get a blue for 0, but then you might spend 3 to put me back in that same position, so what then? You're eyeing the other players' boards to see which tiles they can legally place, which tiles they want (to complete islands for endgame bonuses), which figures they need (primarily black and gray to get guys on the islands and to ward off ships, which disable all vikings in the column where they're placed down to the color matching the ship's flag), and what they can afford. It's a lot to process — and at the same time you also have to pay attention to what you need!
As I said, Vikings is a Eurogame in the classic Hans im Glück model, with players doing stuff in their first few games but not having a clue as to what's a good move beyond the immediate feeling of "Great, I can place this viking instead of stranding him" or "I'm taking this cheap tile because I need a left island regardless of who the dude is". I've played a half-dozen or so times, some on the original release and twice on a press copy of the new Z-Man version (which is identical to the original), and I'm still not thinking far enough ahead. Yes, the wheel is reset every twelve turns, so you don't know what's going to be available in future rounds, but you can (in theory) have an idea of which islands you're building where and how not to build yourself into a corner so that you must shell out 8-9 coins to get that sole left island tile up for grabs so that you can then make use of tiles later that same round. In theory, you can do this, but I keep making the same mistakes — such as not having enough blue fishermen each game and therefore losing points as my vikings are forced to gnaw one another for sustenance — so I'm not there yet.
I haven't even mentioned the advanced game of Vikings, which adds (1) an optional auction at the start of each round so that players can affect the figures available and the order in which they're placed and (2) four bonus tiles each round, with a player claiming a tile when he buys the highest-valued pair on offer. I haven't mentioned them as the base game has provided plenty of challenges for now, with the focus being on your ability to stare at an opponent and think, "I know he really wants that pair, but he also needs that one and he'd have to spend almost everything to get that, so is he really going to buy it or can I wait a round to get it cheaper while still stiffing him?" Everything's open on the table each round, so you have an idea of how things might play out — but you need to read the players, too. Where are they sailing?
No tiles — just islands (Image: André Nordstrand)
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