A Feast for Odin

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes with skipping rungs on the complexity ladder. You watch a YouTube video of Brass: Birmingham looking incredible, impulsively buy it, open the box, read three pages of rulebook - and quietly put it back on the shelf. The game wasn’t the problem. The order was. Euro games have a genuine progression logic to them. The skills you develop in one game - reading a board state, thinking two turns ahead, managing tempo - transfer directly to the next. Get the order right and each new game clicks faster than the last. Get it wrong and you’re fighting mechanics you don’t have the vocabulary for yet. ...

You bought A Feast for Odin because it’s one of the highest-rated games on BoardGameGeek, because you love Vikings, because you love Uwe Rosenberg, or because someone told you it’s the ultimate worker placement game. Maybe all four. And then you opened the box. Hundreds of tiles. A player board covered in negative points. An action board with sixty-one action spaces spread across thirteen columns. Weapon cards. Occupation cards. Island boards. Mountain strips. A feeding phase. An income phase. Something called a “Thing Square.” ...

There’s something deeply ironic about Uwe Rosenberg’s career. He’s one of the most prolific and celebrated designers in the history of board gaming - with multiple titles in BGG’s top 100 and a catalogue spanning nearly 30 years - yet if you described his games to someone unfamiliar with the hobby, they’d think you were joking. “So you… plant beans? And argue about bean futures? And that’s fun?” Yes. Yes it is. And the fact that Rosenberg made it fun is precisely the point. ...