Northgard in about 3 minutes

0:00 this video is brought to you by the three minute board game patrons keep us Independent by supporting us on patreon Kia ora Koutou and welcome to Northgard Uncharted lands in about three minutes, review copy used it has no solo mode, it's a game for two to five players, playing time is medium and it's a moderately complex game in northgard you are Vikings who have gotten very lost and ended up in a vast endless grassland far away from the ocean can you lead your warriors to Victory by building the strongest industrial base the game ends at the end of a round if one player controls three closed regions with three large buildings in them otherwise the game ends after seven turns and the winner is to play with the most victory points which you gain from many sources deck building: you start the game with six basic cards and add more advanced ones throughout the game tile placement: exploring lets you draw tiles and place them on the board area control: controlling regions gives you points and access to resources play a turn: each player starts with 5 basic cards as well as a unique card for their Clan shuffle your cards and draw four to your hand to start the round each turn you will use a card to take an action, let's look at explore here we have the board, the region with the red troops is a closed region while the region with the green tropes is an open region you can only explore from open regions draw a tile and place it see how it closes off that region now doing that scores green one point per tile the region is on you cannot place a tile in a way that would unite two areas that both had troops on them the build action lets you place a small building for one wood or a large building for three they can only go in the matching size spots this building can only be built in a spot showing it

1:31 the recruit action lets you add one troop to the board or two of that region has this building in it there are also card drawing actions and special actions, just follow the instructions on each card some cards will let you do actions multiple times this here is a two move action it costs one movement to move a group to an adjacent region over a white line but it cost two movement to move over a yellow line if you move into a region with enemy troops a fight occurs each troop is worth one strength and this big building gives two strength to the defender then both roll a die, red has by far the higher strength so take control of the region but green inflicts three casualties, two from the dice roll and one from this building green retreats to a neighboring region you may pay one lore to discard one card and draw one two lore to remove a card from your deck entirely and draw two cards and then pay three to discard a card to gain one of your clan upgrade cards to hand you can end the round early in which case you get first pick of the development cards, add it to your discard in harvest your game victory points for each region one for small and two for large as well as the resources generated on each tile and building finally based on the number of troops you have pay food costs or place an unrest in your discards why would you like this game?

2:35 North guard is a reasonably fast-paced area control game with some emergent powers that try to keep it interesting one of the more engaging things about the game are those emergent powers and how do you build them into a coherent toolbox for winning the game there's also a set of seven Clan powers for players to experiment with as well as a creatures module for a change of pace overall the game is a fast-paced area control game that can be fun if you don't take it too seriously the best thing about this game is the regions vs tile system it makes map building a lot more fun however, ultimately northgard is a bit of a mess and it left me feeling like this game needed a bunch more polish before release without getting into discussions of balance, the fact players can end up with dramatically different numbers of actions in a round can cause real issues as can the sudden death win conditions and lopsided fights for a more epic game try Lords of hellas and for a better deck building area control game try tyrants of the underdark northgard: Raiders of the green Shrubbery and if you enjoyed this video hit the notification button like share and subscribe to the channel