Feasting on Negative Points
I have a few groups of people I play board games with online, and while Steam adaptations of games are often well-polished and graphically attractive, we end up on Board Game Arena a lot. If you’re not familiar, Board Game Arena is a site chock full of officially-approved online adaptations of board games, many of which you can play without laying down any human currency whatsoever. If you want to play the premium games, just one of your group has to have a premium membership to launch tables of those games, and the membership is a pretty great deal. All that said, I ended up playing a game I’d never tried before last night at the urging of two of my friends: A Feast for Odin. Said friends had randomly given it a shot a week prior while just browsing Board Game Arena looking at high-complexity games, and as far as complexity goes, this game delivers.
See those eight tabs on the left? Yeah, a lot of those are important too.
When we started our game, my friends helpfully noted that we all start the game at -86 points. I’ve never played a game where you start at such a massively negative score, but when you realize this is a game designed by Uwe Rosenberg, the mind behind Agricola, the mechanical complexity and wacky scoring start to make sense.
A Feast for Odin is a game about Viking life. You build homes and ships, settle far-off lands, hunt, farm, craft, gather materials, pillage, and of course, feast! You have to make sure your people are fed each round by Tetris-ing food tiles into the feast area, though using silver (our all-powerful currency) to supplement is fine too. You can increase your income by placing some of your loot (green and blue tiles) on your player board - covering all the spaces southeast of an income space allows you to then legally cover the income space itself, and your income per turn is set by the lowest numbered income spot still visible on your board. You can also cover those -1 spaces on the board to remove the associated point penalties. Yes, that’s where the -86 starting score comes from!
Once I worked through the complexity, A Feast for Odin was an engaging strategic experience. Just like Agricola, there are Occupation cards that can help set your strategy, but you also want to react to what other players are doing - after all, once a player places their workers on a space, that space is unavailable for the rest of the round. You can go deep on hunting, trapping, and whaling, build and outfit ships for raiding and pillaging, turn smaller, less useful items into big Tetris contributors by crafting, or even breed sheep and cattle. You can even settle other islands in an effort to further increase your silver income and generate other passive bonuses, though those island boards come with negative point squares of their own you’ll need to cover.
I’ve played and enjoyed a lot of games that require this kind of tile management - Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Terraforming Mars, Vegas Showdown (look it up!), and more recently, Ark Nova, so A Feast for Odin was a natural fit for me. However, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this one to a less experienced board game, as I imagine the negative starting score might appear very daunting. Of course, that’s probably less terrifying in paper when there’s not a digital readout of just how negative things are, but with all of the fiddly bits involved, I think the BGA adaptation has to be the ideal way to play. I’d rather set up laptops and tablets around the table than actually build out the board!
Oh, and for the record, you do dig out of that negative hole by the end of the game. My friends managed scores in the low 20s in their first game, and they happened to tie at 71 points each this time around. With their explanation of the mechanics helping me out, I avoided a low-scoring first game and actually managed to fill my entire board plus a stone house to win with a score of 82. Some forum threads report average scores of around 100, and I can easily imagine all of us hitting the century mark in our next playthrough with some better strategic direction. If you’re up for a complex euro game with a lot of information to take in, I strongly recommend A Feast for Odin!