A Feast for Odin (2016)

How to Play A Feast for Odin

A Feast for Odin is a points-driven game, with plethora of pathways to victory, with a range of risk balanced against reward. A significant portion of this is your central hall, which has a whopping -86 points of squares and a major part of your game is attempting to cover these up with various tiles. Likewise, long halls and island colonies can also offer large rewards, but they will have penalties of their own.

Each year follows a familiar pattern of preparation, worker placement, and then meeting the requirements of your feast. The main phase of each year is a worker placement affair. You start with a selection of Vikings, and a large action board with a whopping 61 different options to choose from. Each of these will be arranged from left to right in one of four columns. Each column requires an additional Viking to activate, but they are proportionally more powerful.

At the end of each round, you will need to fill a feast table with food, alternating between plants and vegetable matter. You will also have a chance to lay the valuable green and blue tiles into your main hall. The configuration of these tiles must follow certain requirements, but your main goal is to both cover up a line of coin icons to increase your income, while otherwise encircling certain printed icons to generate those.

You will build your engine over time, following an alternating pattern of outward expansion and hunting against development and cultivation. It all comes down to how much you’re willing to take on at any one time, and what risks you’re willing to set yourself up with for their rewards.

– gameplay description from @StoryBoardGamer’s review

A Feast for Odin Review

A Feast for Odin is a fantastic board game. I hate to sound like a fanboy, but I don’t have anything bad to say about it. It’s high on replayability (desire to play again and again), and it’s rightly among the all-time greats.

 

It’s still going strong in 2022, and with the coming expansions, it doesn’t look like stopping. I can recommend it to anyone. Yes, it’s complex, but it’s easier to learn than you might think. And it has strategic depth like few others. Just make sure you have a large table, as A Feast for Odin is a game that likes to make itself comfortable.

Author Vasilij from victoryconditions.com

A Feast for Odin is a pain to learn and teach though, with a giant rule book and system that isn’t that intuitive. All those icons, boards, concepts and 60+ action spaces lead to a nightmare experience teaching this game…

 

The theme, even though based on accurate historical data, is still fairly thin when you consider you’re laying tiles in a Tetris formation and feeding your people based on the orientation of food. I never feel I’m playing more than a semi-dry Euro, but for many out there, this isn’t a problem anyway. It is a bit of a downgrade in that department from some of Uwe’s earlier large games.

 

Despite the negatives though, A Feast for Odin is still an enjoyable, heavy game and it’s proving very popular with Uwe fans or those who couldn’t care less about theme and just want an engaging puzzle with a ton of options. And when I play it I do enjoy it a lot as I now just ignore the theme being there.

Author Luke Hector from board-game.co.uk

The content of this article is originally from Board Game Geek. For more information and a better understanding of the game, you can watch the videos below.