Blood Rage:

I broke out my Kickstarter of Blood Rage with my group this past weekend. We played a full four player game with all the extra monsters but none of the other expansions.

The game mechanics are amazingly straight forward and are readily printed on the clan cards, which is great. The card play and combat are simple as well. If you have a clan upgrade, you pay for it in Rage (the currency of the game) and add it to one of the three clan upgrade slots. If it is a monster, you pay, and add it to one of the two monster slots. When a monster is played you can then add them to the board to take a territory.

Everyone understood the game after one good round of actions, which at first concerned me a tad. Was it too simple? I am a fan of Eric Lang's games so I as not too worried. After a round or two I realized that while the rules are streamlined the game play has more than enough depth to keep any gamer satisfied.

The game runs over three rounds (called ages) and starts with a card draft. I like that mechanic and your choices carry massive weight for the round so you need to choose carefully. During the draft of cards you will start with eight, pick one to add to your hand for the round and pass them to the next player. This will continue with the age 1 cards until each player has six in their hand.

The card types come in the form of attack cards, upgrades, and quests. I won't go into detail but you need to be careful not to fill your hand with too many of one type. If you do you will limit what you can do.

The next step are the player actions. Each player will take one action by spending rage to do a number of things from place units on the map to adding an upgrade to the clan board or moving from one territory to the other.

Meanwhile, Ragnarok is coming and these provinces will be destroyed in a later part of the game round...well, at least one of them will each age.

The point of placing units in the form of your clan figures and monsters you collect is to pillage the territory, which gets you glory as well as a special boon that will upgrade your basic clan abilities.

Having the monsters in the game adds a ton of theme and flavor. The cool abilities they have do not upset the game balance overly much and can be overcome though the monsters are very powerful in some cases. All of them have a good place in the game.

The pace of the game is pretty fast. it slows a bit when the card drafting takes place and it is such a critical part of your strategy but once the actions start happening everything flows quickly.

I would not call this a gateway game but the rules are so straightforward you could introduce it to new players without much issue.

For veteran gamers, it is a solid and fun strategy title with area control, card drafting, battles, and a great action spend mechanic.

Whenever I am teaching a game I tend to lose. I did not win this one either but it was a lot of fun to play and everyone agreed it would be something we would be playing again.

The minis are so outstanding the deserve to be painted but I do not have the time to do this justice. Painted, they would add even more to the Viking theme and fantastic art.

This is definitely a keeper for my collection.