An innovative Viking duel

⛵Lofoten⛵ is easily the most innovative game we have played in quite a while! It’s a 2-player game, in which you play as two rival viking clans, using your fleet of ships to trade and become the most powerful Jarl of the archipelago. The game uses a clever hand management system that is directly connected to an ingenious spatial movement system - these will keep you on your toes all game long! 😁 Let’s see it up close!

Between the two players there is a market board with 5 goods tiles, and both players have a circular board with 4 card slots in each direction. During the game you can tuck cards into the bottom of your board. Whenever a card in the top slot is adjacent to a goods tile of the same type, the tile automatically gets loaded.

But how do you move the board? 🤔 You will always have 3 cards in your hand, which you cannot rearrange! ☝️ On your turn you play a card:
⬅️The left card moves your board either left, or rotates it counter-clockwise.
➡️The right card moves your board either right, or rotates it clockwise.
(A card will allow 1-3 movements depending on its value).
⬆️You can load your middle card into your bottom slot if it’s empty, plus each card type has its own ability that is triggered when played like this.

Then you draw a new card at the end of your turn, which you can either put right or left, but not in the middle of your hand. There is a lot of strategy and thinking to this!
Also the spatial aspect of rotating requires some getting used to at first. 😅

So loading and unloading tiles becomes a clever dance with your ships, but the fun doesn’t stop here! Each game you randomly choose 4 warehouse cards. Whenever a type of goods is offloaded for the first time, the player doing so will decide which warehouse to put it into. From that point on, only that type can be put there for both players. So you begin a kind of majority scoring game for each goods type, fighting for different rewards. This gives an amazing layer to the awesome action selection system, and a ton of interaction! 🥰

Like I said, this game is amazing!
And there are additional modules you can add to the game! 😮 But more on that later!😉