Tal der Wikinger Wins the 2019 Kinderspiel des Jahres!

Tal der Wikinger from designers Marie and Wilfried Fort and publisher HABA has won the 2019 Kinderspiel des Jahres, Germany's children's game of the year award! (In February 2019, the Forts won the As d'Or — France's game of the year award — in the children's game category for Where's Mr. Wolf?, making them multinational award winners for 2019.)

In the game, which will be released in North America under the name Valley of the Vikings by HABA USA before the end of 2019, players try to collect as many coins as possible through a game of "viking bowling". Each player starts the game with a coin in their viking boat and sits near one of the launching sites. All four colored barrels are placed in their starting positions on the game board no matter how many players are in the game.

On a turn, a player places the giant barrel ball on their launching site, then swings the cardboard viking figure to launch it toward the barrels. Whichever barrel colors are knocked over have their matching tokens moved on the placement track at the top of the board, with the active player determining the order in which tokens are moved. This matters since tokens jump over occupied spaces on the track.

The next player sets up the toppled barrels in whichever spaces they wish, then they take their turn.

When a colored token moves off the end of the placement track, falling into the water, a scoring occurs, with players gaining 1-4 coins from the bank if their token sits on the track next to one of the flags that shows coins. If a colored token is next to a flag that depicts a token of a different color, then the first player steals a coin from the second player; if a colored token is next to a flag depicting its own color, then that player steals a coin from each other player.

Playing at BGG.Spring in May 2019

As with the barrels, all four colored tokens are used no matter the player count so that you have coins to steal from other boats, so that players can leapfrog tokens in ways beneficial to them, and so that coins get removed from the bank as the game ends only once the bank is empty. Whoever collects the most coins wins.

HABA plans to copies of Tal der Wikinger for sale and demo at Gen Con 2019, with the German edition of the game including English rules. To see how the game works in a more visual manner, check out this overview video recorded at Origins Game Fair 2019.