Valheim Board Game

Today me and some friends got together to play the Valheim boardgame. Usually this group gets together for Karaoke at the end of the year, but this time we decided to go for boardgaming instead. Valheim was a game that we played together a lot this year, so we were quite looking forward to this.

The Valheim boardgame is quite impressive. The box is large, with many detailed plastic and cardboard pieces representing the different components of the game.

That said, even though it has lots of pieces, setting up the game was relatively easy. We set up a "scenario", which is the island where the game takes places and a deck of events, and each player prepares their character, by choosing one of two powers.

The goal of the game is to summon and defeat the boss at the end of the scenario. To do that, we need to gather resources and use those resources to make weapons, armor and other equipment. As each player takes turns exploring and gathering, event cards throw enemies at us, keeping the pressure on.

Our goal was to take on each of the four bosses of Valheim in order: Eithkyr, The Elder, Bonemass and Moder. The game suggests that each boss be played as an independent scenario, but there are also "campaign" rules that put things together.

We took down the first two bosses, the game feeling difficult, but doable. For Eithkyr we felt like we were reasonably prepared, but got down to the last player before we defeated the boss. For the Elder it was the opposite, we had to scramble to be able to summon the boss, and thought we were not prepared, but ended up being able to defeat the boss without problem.

Bonemass, though, was a massacre. The events locked us down hard, and from the beginning we felt that we had no chance. We managed to reach the boss (barely), but that's where the game ended.

It is possible that we misread the event rules, making the game more punishing than it should have been. The campaign rule also felt a bit too punishing, maybe it was intended to be a harder mode for players more familiar with the game.

However, all in all, the Valheim game was rather fun to play, and it was certainly very pretty and nice to handle.

After Valheim, we played Firefly, a boardgame based on the old "Firefly" TV series. Firefly is a competitive game where each player tries to make the most money from missions. It suffers a little that once some players takes a lead, it tends to only grow over time. We did not have time to play the full game though. It was a bit nostalgic, since we did play the Firefly RPG for quite a while, many years ago.