The game is played over eight rounds where you’ll send workers from your clan into town to gather the weapons and supplies necessary to fend off hordes of enemies just beyond the walls. Just FYI: the new aspects to Zoo Vadis (unique powers and peacocks) were added in (bolted on) by the good doctor himself. Even the scant engineering it does to disincentivise this approach (prohibited warrior types on monsters and the food costs of journeys) are lackluster.

The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. The ups and downs of sending out warriors sounds exciting and it is, but those three spaces are in the center of the board for a reason. Add in the favour tokens that permit selective rerolls and a large army will steamroller any opposition with absolutely no real risk of significant losses. But short of its somewhat brisker playing time, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would choose to play it over Lords of Waterdeep or any number of other more strategic worker placement games.The rewards for killing monsters, both in terms of direct glory points and the sets bonuses they offer, feel much more substantive. Sometimes you do get a really bad combat roll which will set you back quite a few points - this is sometimes game changing.

But it’s not as much as, say, two monsters on the distant shore and they come with favour tokens that are also worth points at the end. It gets rid of some of the dryness of predictability, but the flavours of unpredictability it gives in their place is dully predictable in its own way.

I have played this game a fair few times and my biggest dislike is this amount of player interaction, that being said you are kept engaged as its always funny to see an opponent roll badly. Here are some of our more lighthearted things to show we're not all about the Serious Business of games. Champions of Midgard (formerly Defenders of Nidaros) is a middleweight, Viking-themed, worker placement game with dice rolling in which players are leaders of Viking clans who have traveled to an embattled Viking harbor town to help defend it against the threat of trolls, draugr, and other mythological Norse beasts.