Discover the fjords

We liked the look of 🏔️ Fjords and were interested in trying it out at GenCon - we found it in the Hot Games Room so we went for it. Excuse us for the quality of the photos, the room was very strangely lit. 😅 It is actually a game from 2005, but re-released now in 2022 with a new shiny coat of paint. 🎨 In short it’s a strategic tile-laying, meeple placing game.

👆Fjords is played in 2 phases:

1️⃣ During the first phase you lay down hexagonal tiles one at a time to build a communal landscape. You don’t actually get any points for tiles. 🤔 You have some usual rules - terrain types have to connect correctly and you have to place adjacent to two tiles. Continue placing until all of the tiles are used up. Your main goal is to strategically place your 4 houses to have better opportunities in the second phase of the game.

2️⃣ In the second phase you start placing out your meeples on the board one at a time. You can only place adjacent to your houses or already placed meeples - also, you can’t place meeples over water or mountains, unless connected through land. You have to be clever and prioritize certain areas, so you are not completely closed out by others. 🧐 The phase ends when everyone has placed all of their meeples or there are no more legal placements.

After the second phase you just tally up your points to determine a winner. 🏆 In the basic variant of the game the person who placed more of their meeples wins. In the more advanced variant there are some runestones that are either automatically placed with certain tiles or players can place them at will - these all have some kind of adjacency bonuses or majority scoring rules around them to spice things up a bit.

The game itself looks quite attractive with big chunky wooden components. 👍 The beginning of the game is strange; you don’t necessarily know if a tile placement bring you points in to future or for your opponents. The second phase is pretty cutthroat, trying to cut off the other from areas that could be filled up with a bunch of meeples. Placing your houses into bad positions could also mean that you flat out lose the game. 😬 I am glad we tried Fjords but I don’t think we need to own it.