![]() Combat manages a modicum of drama with a single dice roll on each side supplementing unit strength. Actions flow quickly, the core mechanisms are simple, and it continually proffers a sense of accomplishment. There is an exceptional sense of smoothness to Northgard: Uncharted Lands. This creates a small yet meaningful touch of asymmetry that supplements your clan’s ongoing ability. Instead of drafting from the row of cards available to all, you can spend an action mid-round to cull a card from your hand and replace it with a clan-specific option. This helps give the game a fast pace, as it incentives players to pass early. In Northgard, you acquire a card from the face-up market immediately upon passing for the round. Most games have you scrounging resources and weighing your purchase options, often stalling progress. What’s most significantly brilliant about this aspect of play is that the cards you add to your deck are free. Over the arc of seven rounds your deck evolves and diverges from your competitors. Each turn you play a card from your hand, allowing you to move across territory, recruit units, or build structures. Much like board game mega-hit Dominion, your deck begins a modest and reliable engine to accomplish the necessary core components of play. The second big influence is the central deck-building action mechanism. It encourages aggressive exploration to close off territory by rewarding you with a bevy of points for doing so. Northgard is simply sublime in its freedom. This is in sharp contrast to most area control games, which possess a very rigid, carefully designed map to promote balance and incentivize conflict. It’s my favorite mechanism of Northgard, in that the region boundaries are unpredictable and full of odd shapes. You pull tiles from a stack and orient them around the growing board to connect and define expanding geographic borders. Uncharted Lands draws primary design influence from the tile-laying classic board game Carcassonne. It’s a violent and surprisingly thoughtful experience that feels right at home on the tabletop. You will bump into other players and discover wild fauna, encounters often leading to outright conflict. Tiles reveal the vast countryside randomly in a process that mimics the procedural generation of its peer. One needs no familiarity with the original Northgard to enjoy this adventure, as its primary connection is in abstracting the core themes of exploration and scarcity.Īs you control one of the asymmetric clans, you'll focus on both exploring the new continent and developing its lands. Designer Adrian Dinu has crafted a standout board game that combines well-established systems with a fresh vision.
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