Grey Fox Games Champions of Midgard | Viking Themed Strategy Game | 2-4 Players | 90 Minutes

I am updating this review: All components as per description. This game is great. I recommend it.

Champions of Midgard is my favorite game featuring my favorite board game mechanic, worker placement.This is a good game to use for teaching worker placement to new gamers, but should be reserved for when they start to transition into more complicated games.That’s not to say the game is complicated. For experienced gamers, the mechanics and rules will be easy to comprehend and pick up.Thematically, the game ties in well with the worker placement mechanic. On your turn you will choose a specific wp spot in your Viking village based on the strategy you are pursuing to become the next chief of your village.One of the strategies involves fighting mythical monsters and trolls using beautiful custom dice representing different types of warriors that range from more offensive to more defensive.Cards and wooden meeples are high quality.There are upgrade kits available to make the game more immersive. The Valhalla and Dark Mountains expansion really make the game sing.I highly recommend this if you like the Viking theme or like worker placement or dice chucking in your games.

Fantastic game! I'll spare you the summary of the game because all the other reviews here do a good job of that, but I just want to say that this is probably my new favorite game that I own now.It was also a big hit with my friends (I was a little nervous because it's the first worker plcement game we've played). Only takes a few minutes to set the game up after you've played a game and are familiar with the cards and dice etc...In the first round it clicks with everyone at the table. Very easy to get the hang of. And you're never really out of the game even if you're in last place. We just played our second game tonight and after the final scoring takes place, the two people that were in the lead finished last and the person who was in last place during the game scored some big bonuses from some objectives and shot into first.Anyways, I never really write reviews on here but I was compelled to give this a 5 star review and share my thoughts because our group had an absolute blast playing this!Oh and lastly, the artwork is phenomenal and the theme is lots of fun. Who doesn't want to kill monsters and trolls with Vikings?

I love this game. So much so that I actually bought a lot of upgrades: wood/meat tokens, viking meeples, every promo card I could get, and the game mat.This is a fun worker placement game. It adds some chance with dice battle mechanics, but otherwise utilizes strategy. You gather resources/soldiers to prepare for ship journeys to slay monsters and gain glory.The dark mountain expansion adds land journeys and archers, which are a powerful offensive only unit. You can also play with 5 players.The valhalla expansion adds shield maidens and berserkers, both very powerful units. More importantly, it gives you souls of your dead warriors that you can use to fight legendary monsters or gain boons from the gods. You also get a chief dice and new chief powers.Both expansions add new cards and leaders. Personally, I like and play with both expansions. The player who gains the most glory wins and becomes the new jarl!!

I watched a review of this game that soured me on it and I moved on. The reviewer had disliked this game due to the luck involved with the dice rolls and how this could cause unpleasant swings in the game. I felt that this would be a big issue with my gaming crew (usually consisting of me and my children) and so I let it go as I don't need any more games (I want more games, but I don't need more). But something kept bringing me back to this...That "something" was that I kept seeing this game mentioned on different people's favorite games lists, and so I looked into it again.Many of these people recommended the game, but only with both of it's expansions, Valhalla and The Dark Mountains, and so I looked into those.Valhalla helps to mitigate bad dice rolls by providing cardboard chits representing the souls of the warriors (the different types of dice in the game that you roll to "battle" the monsters) lost in battle. These "souls" then can "travel" to Valhalla and can get you special cards and epic monsters from the Valhalla board that can give you points and bonuses, including stronger warrior dice (there are two new types, one of which is pink, which my daughter very much appreciated).Valhalla also provides two new characters and blue leader dice for each player with unique powers for each of the playable characters in the game. You can lose this leader dice in battles that you send it to, but you can get it back through certain acquisitions in Valhalla.The Dark Mountains expansion adds a new location to travel to to fight a new type of monster. It also adds another type of warrior dice and cards for the other spots in the base game. It also adds two new characters.These sounded fantastic and appeared to correct the aforementioned reviewer's issues with the game and so I took another look at reviews of the game, but with both expansions... And ended up walking away, again.The expansions did appear to "fix" the game, but then appeared to break it in a new way.One of the things I like best about a lot of worker placement games (meaning a game where you place your game pieces, representing your workers, on different spaces on the board to get/do stuff) is the tightness of the board. Meaning that there are a limited number of spots on the board and you want to get to the ones you want to use that round before someone else does. And the expansions appeared to make the game too loose by providing too many available spots. Plus, it made the game pretty big overall.So I moved on, yet again, and ran into the same issue. There are a lot of people who love this game and are vocal about it.And then I had an epiphany:What if I only added the Valhalla expansion?That would help mitigate bad dice rolls without loosening the board. Brilliant! And so, I bought this game from this site and the Valhalla expansion from another that had a better price (because I'm cheap).This came first and I decided to give it a try without the expansion and had another epiphany: This game doesn't need an expansion to be great!Yes there are dice rolls, and yes luck is a factor, but if you prepare appropriately for those dice rolls, they don't ruin your day as the base game does provide ways to mitigate those rolls so that they usually get the job done. And if you don't prepare appropriately for those dice rolls, then you are knowingly taking a risk, which can be super exciting and not as disappointing if they fail (but way more fun if you succeed).So, do you need an expansion (or for some, two expansions) to make this game "fun"? Not in my opinion. However, we don't play without the Valhalla expansion now that we have it (it's pretty great). But I would love the game still without it.And as for The Dark Mountains expansion. I still don't want it as I don't want to risk messing up the tightness of the board and I don't see that this game needs anything else.But that's me. You do you.