Tiny Epic Vikings Review: On The Road To Rune

laughs [Music] [Applause] hey there everybody it's Mike delicio and today I'm going to be reviewing the newest game in a line of games that have been around for quite a while the tiny epic Line This Is Tiny epic Vikings so how does this game stack up with other games in the series well let's head over to the table I'll give you a brief overview on how the game is played then we'll come back here and I'll let you know what I think [Music] okay here we see a game of tiny epic Vikings all set up at the beginning of the game you're going to randomly choose three god cards and place them up above the play area there are other god cards that come with the game again you just randomly choose three and put them at the top you also are going to randomly assign a rune to each one of these so in this case Thor has this C roon here if you can see there we go and Odin has Ann and Freya has f there's also some setup that happens on the board here with initial placement of boats and things along those lines the way the game is played is going to be played over three eras and the player that has the most points at the end of the third era is going to win the game primarily the points are going to come from the number of runes that you have collected throughout the game both in these favor cards which you can see they have runes on them and also in these runes that begin populated on the islands that are going to be taken from the islands and sometimes taken from other players the level of the Gods Fury as it's called that's what these are tracking is going to be a kind of a strength meter to determine the value of the different runes alright so in the three rounds you're going to always start with a drafting phase and what this is going to show you here is that in the first era you're going to have four cards you're Drafting and you're going to go on a clockwise manner second era is going to be five cards drafting counterclockwise and in the third and final era you're going to draft six cards back to the clockwise method so the drafting is very similar to other games you may have played before like sushi go or seven wonders essentially you'll have your four cards in the first area you start with you put one face down in front of you you pass the cards in the first era clockwise to that player player to your right it's going to pass them to you and you're going to do this four times until you have four cards once that happens in player order this is going to denote whoever the starting player is you are going to choose to play a card so let's say that these are the four cards that I drafted on your turn you are going to always play a card either face up or face down below your mat here and you're going to do them in order from left to right let's take a look at these cards a couple of things to pay attention to they're all going to have a rune associated with them that's in the upper left of the card they're going to have a strength value which is only going to be used if you play the card for Battle they're going to have a leader ability that you can do here this is essentially an action and then there is a roon action that potentially could trigger depending upon what you have out in front of you so if you play a card face up it means that you are playing it for the action right here if you play it face down that means that you are either starting a battle or joining a battle that somebody else has initiated so that's how you can determine whether it's for battle or for the action itself so let's say for example I wanted to play for an action I would do it face up take that Associated action and then if I had the Rune associated with this Rune icon down here I could do this Rune action this is saying you'd need an end card to be able to do this so if this is the first card I played in an era I would not be able to do that however you can see I have a card here that has an N roon if I played this first and then on a future turn went ahead and played this I now would have the N I need right here this is what would be called an active Rune active runes are either the runes that are on these tokens or runes that are cards that you've played in front of you you have what are called passive runes which are just going to be these favor cards if you get one of these you'll put it face down above your mat you can have up to three of them and those are only used for final gain score final game scoring they're not used for multipliers or or modifiers things along those lines so let's talk about the different actions briefly this is a sailing action and this is going to have a particular value applied for it it might be times two it might be times three if I play this what I'm able to do is move my ship around the board here and you can see that you've got these islands that have the runes that begin the game on them and it just tells you right there on the board what it starts with you've got these little Villages that are on particular Port spots and you've got these other Port spots that are here docking areas so if I played this times three ship movement I can move these dotted lines are going to denote the different regions so let's say for example I wanted to go and I wanted to go into this doc spot right here I can go one and it takes one to dock on an island okay so that would be two of my movement you can do up to three all right at this point I've got a couple of different options the first thing is is that I can raid that Village the cost to do so is listed here on the mat on the aromat and the first area costs one iron to raid a village second era two iron third era three you start with two of each of the three resources iron food and wood so maybe I would spend my one iron I would go ahead and I would put this Village off to the left of my board all right now I've docked in that Island I have another option I can bring settlers onto this island okay and I do that by spending food for each settler that I want to bring aboard and I can bring aboard as many as I have here for the shipping action so I could bring up to three settlers onto this island cost of one food each however I started with only two Foods so the best I could do would be to spend that two food and bring two settlers from my player mat onto this island this is what's called boots on the ground when you have either a settler on an island or your um I believe this is a temple called a temple this would also be considered boots on the ground and when you do that if you've got the most influence in the island you can take that Rune token as long as you have boots on the ground well I do no one else has any influence on the island and the amount of influences listed here on your player mat essentially these are each worth one uh and the ship is worth a couple so I can immediately take this Rune and I keep this next to me now I've got actually two n runes at my disposal right now and the other thing that's going to happen is that the fury of this God is going to go up one so essentially the value of this Rune goes up anytime that a rune is stolen either taken from an island or if another player were to take this from me you would increase the fury of the associated God okay so that is the shipping action also now that I have this Village either on this turn or a future turn I could dedicate this Village and do a particular thing there are four actions over here that that are going to be the ones I talk about so I can do a second action or maybe I want to really bump up the value of this n Rune now that I've got one although I may not keep it that would boost it up too okay you've got that for each of these and then you've got actions over here that are corresponding to the ones I'm going to be talking about all right this is the Harvest action it's very simple you can basically just get four resources of your choice in any order you want you can go ahead and just bump those up along your track this is the build action that is going to be where you either are going to be bringing new ships out on the board or you are going to be doing a temple all right actually I'm missing one of my ships right there there we go you start with three on the board if you want to build ships it is two wood Three Wood then four wood if you want to build a temple it is five wood or seven wood so let's say that uh if I wanted to build a ship I could spend two wood and then this ship can go adjacent in a fjord adjacent to anywhere where I have presents so maybe I put it right there okay temples have to go on to a spot that you have a villager in you can place it right there and this is going to give you four influence it also when you build these things they're going to give you better harvests so if you see here once you get rid of a ship or build a ship I should say every Harvest you get an extra food and when you build the temples every Harvest you get an extra resource of your choice and if you built them both you'd get two and it would be the same with the ships you get more and more food just improves your Harvest action um that was built sorry and then the last thing here is settling moving your settlers or exploring with your settlers and this is saying that you can up to two times explore with a settler so using these lines if if I wanted to I could go here and then I'd be able to get that Rune go here of course probably you're not gonna be able to do this this early on but later on you'd be able to move them around and potentially wrestle control away from other players If instead you play a card face down if you were the first one in that era to do so that means that you are initiating a battle and you play the card face down what you're going to do is you're going to look at these favor cards and you're going to choose one that is on either the left or the right end either above or below the board so you essentially usually have four choices to go from all right so let's say that I wanted to initiate a battle and I'm battling over this favor card which has the F roon the N Rune and also the winner of this will get whatever those resources are you place it right here to kind of let everybody know this is what the battle is over and in subsequent turns other players can choose to join the battle by playing a card face down or not all right when you do have a battle if everyone who is in the battle flips over their cards and they look at the value that is up there if whoever has the most strength is going to win that battle they're going to win this favor card they'll immediately get the resources there and then they'll place it face down above one of their three spots and this is going to be used for end game score boring The Losers of the battle as long as they have participated in any way are going to be able to get kind of a compensation which is that they are going to be able to do whatever it says on the card there so for example this Thor for The Losers of the battle says that each other player must remove one of their settlers from an island of their choice so they get a little bit of a boon there all right and then you're also going to be bumping up the the fury of those Gods every time that you do that some of the battle cards some of the strength cards have modifiers this is basically saying you'll have three strength times every n that you have so if I had this I have this end and this end this would be worth six however to use this one you have to spend an iron okay some of the cards will have things along those lines this is a similar one here okay so you're going to continue to do this in player order drafting your cards playing the cards out moving down the era until you get to the end of the third era and at that point you're going to evaluate final scoring and final scoring is going to be determined by the strength of the Gods based upon the fury level that they have and so here it shows you that the runes that you got from the islands which are these tokens right here for the highest strength God are each going to be worth six second strength five and third strength four and then your favor cards are going to be five four and three in descending order based upon the strength on the fury level of those Gods you would flip this over be able to do a scoring track that way and whoever has the most points at the end of the third era wins tiny epic Vikings let's head back over and I'll let you know what I think [Music] all right well there you see uh generally how a game of tiny epic Vikings goes there are some things I left out I was a very high level overview uh but you can hopefully get the general gist of it there so as I mentioned in the intro uh the tiny epic line of games have been around for quite a while and I've reviewed a number of them in the past on this channel I will state that the in the last few years I found myself less and less enamored with some of the tiny epic games and so um I tried not to let that color my Impressions at all when I came into this game I wanted to as I always do try to have a completely open mind but I do want to mention that the last few tiny epic games have not worked very well for me so I was interested to see if this would kind of break that Trend there are a number of games that came out earlier in this line that I like quite a bit tiny Epic Quest is one of my favorites and I also like tiny epic galaxies tiny epic dinosaurs there are a lot of games in line I like last few I haven't felt quite as good about so first thing is let's talk about the art and the components generally speaking I have very positive things to say about this the tiny epic line can be a little bit uh tricky when it gets into the idea of components because the idea behind this is you're packing a lot of game into a very small box and so what sometimes happens is that to do that you have to make some concessions maybe some of the cards are a little bit difficult to read or the iconography can be a little bit challenging I I didn't find that to be an issue in this particular game I I found the the cards were all relatively clear the size of the text was fine for me uh there actually isn't a whole lot of text but what text is there was easy enough for me to read I really like the wooden components in this particular game a whole lot the screen print printed wooden meeples and the runes are all nice and chunky very satisfying to kind of play around with the biggest issue I had was with the board itself and I'm just gonna grab it here so this is a tri-fort fold board and it's the first time that a board has been included in the tiny epic line and it's double-sided one side for four players the other for one to three the issue that I had with it is that no matter what I tried I could not get this board to lay completely flat um you know I've tried the bending in opposite directions on the folds as much as I could without you know trying to you know try not to break it of course it's not to the level that the game is unplayable by any means I mean I I had no issues playing the game but it was slightly frustrating that the board does not completely lay flat uh at least in my copy of the game and so that is something I did want to mention everything else like I said I really liked art and component wise so for the gameplay itself this is a game that I think we would be foolish uh well I would be foolish to not mention what seems to be a pretty clear Inspiration Point for this game which I think would be blood rage okay so blood rage an area control Style game drafting game where you are playing as Vikings okay sure there is some there there's there are some similarities here in the game primarily in this idea of the Three Ages and your drafting cards to drive the action so it would be foolish to say that there's no connection between these games however they feel quite different honestly and and I'm glad that they do because I think I would have been a little bit disappointed if this was you know essentially a clone of blood Rage which is a game I like a whole lot it has elements of blood rage that I like that is here too in other words I like drafting games I like cards where you I like games where you're drafting cards and those cards can drive the action um what is different about this game is primarily in how the scoring works and and so that makes it feel significantly different than blood rage and while the the battle system has some similarities they do feel different enough to me I also like the fact that in in this game when you lose the battle sometimes you'll go into a battle knowing you're going to lose it because you want the benefits on the god cards now there are some similarities and I'm not going to continue to talk about blood rage too much but there are some simulators there where sometimes you'll want to enter a battle knowing you'll lose but those are very specific uh times in the game this really if you don't have an action you'd rather play it's almost never a bad idea to at least go into a battle you might win and if you lose you're going to get whatever the uh the God card says for you there and you're going to bump up the fury track of that God too which might be helpful for you if you've got runes associated with it so while there are similarities it does feel uh different enough it stands on its own um I like how simple the actions are um I like the fact that the cards are kind of multi-use it's very satisfying to be able to build up the runes that allow you to take those Rune actions uh I I think that the cl the cleverness and the CL and the in the card play is the strongest element of this design and it's quite clever like I really like you know kind of the the decisions you have to make the timing decisions are feel substantial to me and they feel impactful um you know you might want to take a build action first but then you realize that you can't do the Rune action with that Boone with that build card unless you play a different card first and so being able to kind of try to manipulate that and be as efficient as you can in the card play using those runes to kind of build and combo off of each other feel satisfying and I do appreciate that I also like the fact that it doesn't necessarily feel devastating when an Island's control is taken from you or a rune is taken from you you know because you have the opportunity to to get that back there are a number of different ways and there are other ways to kind of uh you know balance things out so that you feel like you were in the game so all of that is positive my biggest negative to the actual design and gameplay itself is honestly with the scoring which is the part that I said earlier kind of makes it stand out the most from from blood rage um the scoring is a little bit I feel a little bit removed from it the the actions that I'm taking um don't always it's not always very obvious how those actions are you know translating to straight points so you always have to be thinking of okay what runes am I sure to have which are going to be the ones that are in your favor cards you know I you know you're going to have those unless you choose to discard them to play a different favor card um and then making sure that the gods associated with those runes are at the highest level they can be because you're going to get more points that way you essentially want Runes of the highest strength gods and so that's clear-cut enough but I did feel like oftentimes I was getting kind of lost in the weeds I was focusing on my actions what actions I'm going to do my most efficient way of playing cards that didn't always translate to getting more points so I guess you know that is on me as a player but certain games the the opacity of the actions to points are higher than others and I felt like it was you know a relatively opaque uh scoring in this but again your mileage may vary there for me that was probably the biggest downfall of the Divine and it wasn't a big one okay the bottom bottom line is that I'm very happy with this game I I as I said early I was trying to come into it with it with an open mind but I I did always have in the back of my mind you know gosh I feel like the the last couple tiny epic games didn't work for me as much this one is uh making the series come back strong for me I'm going to be giving tiny epic Vikings an 8 out of ten an easy recommendation I feel like this game does a lot of things very well it feels uh it feels like a design that is fully fully impactful in other words everything you do makes sense scoring can be a little opaque but otherwise you know you're sailing your putting settlers on Islands you're building things to give you better Harvest actions you're harvesting things you're all of it makes sense it's very smooth you know not as many rough edges as I found in some of the other recent tiny epic games it's relatively easy to to teach and play um it does have a variant for the two-player game uh which you know some people don't like that you have to have kind of like a little bit of a dummy player going on but I do want to mention that is part of the the design as well uh and so you know your miles may vary on whether that is something that bothers you or not but overall really a solid game one that I'm happy to come back to and and play some more and you know there's enough Variety in the game as well with the different god cards and things along those lines all right well that's tiny epic Vikings this is Mike delicio signing off from the dice tower Midwest Annex [Music] [Applause] thank you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 17,886

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, juegosdemesa, Brettspiele, ボードゲーム, brädspel, jeuxdesociété, משחקילוח, 보드게임, deskováhra, graplanszowa, bordspel, 棋盘游戏, gioco da tavolo, desková hra, gra planszowa, настольная игра, trò chơi trên bàn cờ, jogo de tabuleiro, لعبة اللوحة

Id: W7AtoWYWpNg

Length: 23min 8sec (1388 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2023