The Danes - A Feast for Odin Game | The Game We've Been Waiting For... | Board Game Preview Video
Transcript
I don't think I've ever been more excited
Mhm.
for an announcement or an anticipation of a game than I have ever been.
Yeah, it was pretty exciting when I saw it.
Hello everybody, my name is Ilya.
And my name is Dyler. Together we make up Covert, a couple that loves to play board games.
And today we'll be telling you about a big one called
The Danes, a Feast for Odin game. This one is designed by Gernot Kopke and Uwe Rosenberg and is published by Feuerland Spiele.
Who shared this prototype with us. Now this is a handmade prototype.
Yes.
And none of the game is final, so everything you see here is still in progress. The art, the iconography. So take that with a grain of salt. But with that said, let's give you an overview of this game.
In The Danes, a Feast for Odin, you'll lead your own group of Vikings across eight rounds, gathering resources, building ships and settlements, hunting, trading, exploring new lands, and finding all sorts of way to grow your wealth and score victory points. Now the heart of this game is worker placement. Each round you'll take turns placing your Vikings onto the central action board, immediately carrying out the action you choose. Most spaces can only be used once each round. So while you're largely focused on building your own strategy, other players can get in your way. And there are a lot of options for worker placement. You can gather and process resources, hunt and fish, raise animals, build houses and ships, craft valuable goods, trade, raid, explore, and much more. The action board is divided into five columns, and each works a little differently. The first column can only be used with your very first Viking of each round, while the last column can only be used with your last. The middle columns require one, two, or three Vikings. So deciding when to use your workers, how many to commit, and what you want to save for your final action becomes a big part of how you approach your gameplay.
Taking actions is only one element of the larger puzzle. Throughout the game, you'll collect goods in a variety of different shapes and colors, and many of these goods can be placed onto your personal boards. Your home board begins covered in negative points, income spaces, and bonuses. Throughout the game, you'll cover your board with resources you acquire. Your lowest uncovered number along the money diagonal determines how much silver you'll receive each round, while completely surrounding certain bonus spaces can generate additional resources every round. So, even though two actions may give you a similar amount of stuff, the shape and color of what you receive can make a huge difference. One of the biggest additions in the Danes is a new campaign system.
Throughout the game, you can discover different campaigns, each offering its own board and strategic focus, along with new buildings, action tiles, occupations, and sometimes special tiles. Only certain campaigns are available at any given time, and as the rounds progress, undiscovered options are gradually replaced by new ones, giving you new opportunities as the game progresses. Buildings can also give you more areas to fill with goods, while ships open up additional possibilities like fishing, long-distance trades, raids, voyages of discovery, and even immigration. You can also collect animals like sheep, pigs, cattle, and horses. These can reproduce throughout the game, giving you another way to build up resources and points. But, that's the general overview of the many paths you can take in the game.
Before we get into our thoughts, let's give you a rundown of the round structure. Each round begins by progressing the campaigns, gaining another Viking, and collecting any harvest for that round. Then comes the main action phase where you take turns placing those Vikings and building out your strategy. After everyone has finished taking actions, you'll collect income from your boards and potentially breed your animals. Then, you'll have to take care of your Vikings. You'll do this by paying taxes by filling in a row of your tax barn, and then filling in empty spaces of your banquet table with food and silver. If you're not able to feed your Vikings or pay your taxes, you'll earn a penalty, which will cost you three points at the end of the game. After the feast, you'll collect any bonuses you've activated on your boards, draw a new weapon, update the available resources, retrieve your Vikings, and begin the next round. Across all of this, you'll also encounter occupation cards. They can give you new abilities and help push your strategy in different directions, or simply earn you victory points.
After the feast in the eighth and final round, you'll have one last opportunity to place your remaining goods and resources before scoring. You'll earn points for many of the elements we've discussed, including your boards, buildings, ships, discovered cow pens, occupations, animals, special tiles, and your remaining silver. But, any negative spaces you failed to cover along with any penalties you collected will reduce your final score. Once everything's been added together, whoever has the most points wins. And there you have it, the Danes. Now, that's just a simple overview. There's obviously a lot of layers and depths in all the actions and what you're doing in the game. But, I guess the very first question we want to address is how does this compare to A Feast for Odin, and what are some of the similarities, what are some of the differences? Where do you want to get started?
I mean, it's called A Feast for Odin game, so let's start right there. The way that you feel when you're playing this game, the actions, the sequencing, things are going to be very familiar for people who have played A Feast for Odin. I think what they've done here is they've cleaned it up a little bit. They've obviously added some new things into it, but it gives you that similar place workers, deal with your feast, get more workers later on, add them to your pool, and then as the rounds continue on, you're going to get more and more workers to be able to do more and more things with. Exactly.
Now, when this game was first announced,
Mhm.
I don't think I've ever been more excited
Mhm.
for an announcement or in anticipation of a game than I have ever been.
Yeah, it was pretty exciting when I saw it.
Because we both really, really enjoy A Feast for Odin, and it's probably one of our top games in general.
overall. Top 10 at least, probably top five games of all time.
Wow.
Mhm.
And now getting to play this was an absolute treat because it is it does take up everything you love about A Feast for Odin and almost gives it another oomph.
It does.
But it is very familiar. Like if you were expecting a Feast for Odin-like game, it is it is it is A Feast for Odin with improvements, with new layers, with new strategy. Because I think if you've played A Feast for Odin a lot of times, there are some strategies that are better than others. There are some things you will compete with your opponents to get to before everybody else. Where here it's like that new feeling kind of like, what should I be doing? Like obviously this is worth a lot of points, but this is also worth a lot of points.
Mhm.
And there's a lot of small minor tweaks too. Like the occupation cards, for example, you can now play one where you can discard one now instead of playing one to get a victory point token. And they're races. If the earlier you do that, the higher the victory points. So there's little levels that have improved as a whole in my opinion.
There are also less actions for you to be able to like upgrade your tiles from red to green to green to blue, for example. So it really makes you think more consciously about how you're going to utilize everything that you were given and and maximize all of those tiles so that you can use them for the right reasons.
And I think one of my favorite additions is the new style of worker placement. It is now five columns instead of four. And now instead of incrementals of workers, the first column is your very first worker. You can only place your very first worker in that column. And those are typically races because they're mostly better actions than some of the other ones.
Yeah, you've got to decide if it's worth taking those actions or or foregoing them entirely for the round to be able to do maybe a more important action for yourself at the time. But you are you do end up giving up a decent amount.
And there are no more four worker actions. Instead, the very last column, the fifth column, is your very last worker. And it has to be your last worker. You cannot choose to go there first. So sometimes you'll have to plan to place multiple workers if there is an action that you're really trying to do before somebody else. I do also like that you can copy an action. If you unlock that little tree spot,
There's yeah.
There's that one opportunity to copy an action when the timing is right. And that is always helpful because I feel like the Even though there's so many spaces, and it's the same for A Feast for Odin, there's so many spaces you can go to, but there are really direct competitions for a few of those spaces, and it is really interesting to see.
But the most obvious change into this game is the kaupangs.
Now, what a kaupang is is it is an Old Norse term for a market or like a marketplace. And here we have a variety of kaupangs that we as Vikings can explore. Now, when I first saw this, I kind of envisioned this as more of like scenarios.
Right.
Like you're going to go and maybe this game you're going to explore this section, this game you're going to go explore this section. No. No, no, no, no, no. Listen here. That is not it at all. It is in fact all of them can be They have the potential to be explored in the games. But not at the same time because each comes with two different regions you can explore, but if one of the regions is explored, the other isn't accessible. And as the round continues, different regions become available. So, in the third round, you're going to flip the first three backwards. So, there's three new regions you can explore, but the three ones you initially could explore are gone.
It's like in A Feast for Odin where you have the certain islands that you can visit, and then every round one gets flipped over, others get coins added to them. They've got like a similar system there, except it's more involved in the sense that the islands themselves, the Kaapangs, are add more to the game than what the islands in A Feast for Odin do.
Yeah, they have buildings that they add.
Unique buildings.
Unique buildings that do a variety of things that sometimes have their own income. What? There's also different items that can be added. There's occupations as well, which you'll actually draw random ones from. So, every time you may see different occupations come up. And get this. Worker placement locations.
Yes.
For the main board. Which you'll have to unlock, and then later on you can place them with a worker to take that action, which either will improve one of the worker placement locations already on the board, or add new ones to that first or that last column, which is exciting, very different, and very exciting.
The other thing too that comes with the islands is there are some ways to fill up spaces so you can or use or pay resources to get an an item that will then be able to be placed onto your board, even the island that you just discovered, for example. So, that is really interesting.
And there's also ways to now send ships there. And in sending ships, you'll decrease the vic- or you'll decrease the victory points you lose, but you can also deliver red and orange goods, which typically you can't place in those locations. So, there's layers of more mechanics and more interesting things that can happen with that. But, I think the neatest aspect of this is each of these campaigns could have easily been an expansion. You could have put four together and be like, "Here's a mini expansion for this." The fact that they're their own system and each of the games you can play and you can say, "Hey, I want to go here. It's worth a ton." Cuz for example, the very last one that gets flipped at the very end, it is worth 45, I believe, victory points
by itself.
Mhm.
Obviously, it has a lot of negative spaces that you want to fill in, but maybe your whole strategy is to collect enough goods, get that one, and go for a slam dunk at the very end of the game.
Mhm.
You have a whole booklet that you will go through and you can decide which strategy you really want to take.
Mhm.
Of course, like worker placement games, other players can ruin that strategy by taking away what you really need and want.
But, the amount of planning, amount of strategizing, you can really go with that whole explorative route of, "I'm going to go see what's out there. I'm not even going to look at the booklet. I'm going to see I'm going to take out and just deal with it as it comes." Or, you can do a lot of planning, you can do a lot of research this game, I'm going to do this strategy and I think it'll really appeal to both types of players and it really makes this game much more replayable throughout all of your encounters.
Mhm. Yeah, the game in general I just think feels like a lot more encapsulating of all of the stuff that's going on. I know from a few of my plays that I've been wanting to like just go into one zone, but I feel like it's very fun to have to be able to explore all these different regions and these different areas because familiar to people who are playing A Feast for Odin is there are a lot of the animals and the breeding of the animals. So, you've got your pigs, your horses, your sheep, and your cows and those are all um coming back to this game, but it's not all that you can worry about, but you do kind of want to sprinkle yourself in there because now all of a sudden you can actually just purchase animals that are already pregnant and make them have uh babies right away and your engine is even is one more turn quicker.
It is one more turn quicker.
I think generally this is one of the games that once we have the final version of this game, I wholeheartedly can say that it will replace A Feast for Odin for me.
Yeah, I'm interested to see that.
Because it has still the shorter game and has so much variation. It still does the same thing you're trying to do, but it adds so many different layers of strategy that you can just go and explore and have fun with what you want to do. You can really experience the game in the way that you want to experience it.
Yeah.
It also features scenarios, which we have not yet played through cuz we don't actually have the rule books for them yet, but there's at least three scenarios that are included in the game, and I'm sure you can learn much much more about that when the campaign comes. So, even more goodies, even more ways to experience the game, even different maps and boards that you can encounter with, which I just love to see. Having loved this game so much, I'm so excited to see more of it, but in just such a thoughtful way.
Yeah, I think we just scratched the surface on this one, too. Like we played it enough to see the differences between this and A Feast for Odin. We've come to appreciate it, but I think we're only just getting into what this game has to offer. And like Ilya said, there are some things that we haven't even been able to try out because it's just not ready yet. Or there are things that we're waiting on, kind of thing. So, I'm excited to see what else this game brings.
It is a longer game.
Mhm.
That is the one
Slightly. I think I think the thing about this is as soon as you learn how to play the game, and for those of you who do like A Feast for Odin, it's actually really easy to get into. The startup is actually very very quick.
Mhm.
But
not very quick. You have to set it all up. It has a lot of components.
for the box that you see, right? So, like if you're And and even so, like I would definitely still recommend if you've never tried A Feast for Odin that you play that game first and maybe come to this afterwards, but maybe that perspective changes after They're the full version, kind of thing. That's true. But it definitely has hit the marks and has met the anticipation. I can't wait to see what is more. We unfortunately have to send it off to the next person and I will forever miss it. But hopefully one day it'll travel the world and come back to our table and we'll play it many many more times.
Yes.
All right, that's all we got, I think, right? I don't think we have much more, but we do have answers. So [snorts] if there elements you're curious about, if there's questions that you have to other fellow A Feast for Odin fanatics, please leave them in the comments down below because we'd love to chat to you about this game. We'd love to pick nitpick various elements that we hopefully remember and we'll continue the conversation as the campaign progresses, as the campaign campaigns campaigns I was going to say campaign, but campaign came into my mind and it just morphed.
[gasps]
But as the campaign progresses, I'm sure we'll get to see much much more of it and I'm just excited. I'm still as excited as I was back in the day.
Mhm. Are you excited for this game? You should let us know down in the comments below. But until then, if you liked this video, make sure you hit that thumbs up button, hit that subscribe button if you're new here cuz we love talking board games.
And obviously hit that little bell because then you know when our next video is coming out. You don't want to miss one. What if there's another really exciting game announcement we're going to break down for you? Break it down.
Wicked wicked.
Yeah.
But for a question of the day I have a good one this this day. This day I have a good one.
This daynes.
This day. The question of the day
Question of the daynes.
is what game would you lose your mind if someone said there's a sequel to?
Ooh, yeah, the long awaited sequel.
Like what if someone is just like today we have announced What it like what's that meme where it's just like woo.
What game is that for you? Leave it in the comments down below.
Until then Until next time though
Until next time.
See you later. Bye.
Bye.