A strange little game

If I had to use a single word to describe Skoventyr from inPatience, I think I'd go with “strange”. One of the reasons is how it's based on Danish folklore: You are playing a badger 🦡 named Vogter and fighting against the evil Gamle Erik 👹 by summoning creatures to defeat its minions.

The other reason is how unusually the game functions (at least compared to most of our cooperative games). There is no actual round structure, you will basically just play turns choosing 1 of 4 actions. There is no opponent turn or AI deck or anything like that. 😯, yet the game “reacts” to your actions and ramps up in difficulty. During the game you’ll go through and reshuffle the deck containing 5 different ally types and a bunch of adversary cards. You’ll buy allies who (sooner or later) end up in the discard pile, while adversary cards mostly go back to the bottom of the deck - so the ally-to-adversary ratio goes down making your life much harder down the line.

A centerpoint of the game is a rondel made up of 6 trees 🌳 - this is where the distance to your adversary is shown. If he reaches you, you lose. ☠️ To win, you have to defeat 6 minions by playing allies 🧚 to the tree cards, then discarding enough of them each time. 🏆 Due to certain effects, trees could be damaged or entirely removed, which makes your little rondel even smaller.

To get cards you have to ‘pay’ their effect (e.g. moving Gamle Erik closer or damaging trees), otherwise you can push your luck to get them for free. If you have cards in hand you can either play them to trees for free, or discard them for their useful special ability - which way to use cards is a big dilemma (remember the discard pile?). You will also need to deal with adversary cards that pop up in this display.

You can play with 1-4 players, but I think Skoventyr might be more ideal for solo - there is always a lot to consider and wrong decisions could instantly lose you the game, so quarterbacking is unavoidable.

There are also 2 optional modules included that add additional tasks to complete. These add not just difficulty but also bonuses that can help you, so they nicely increase the decision space. Overall, a fun game!