48. Raiders of the North Sea

In this episode, we put on our funny Viking hats and go plundering in Raiders of the North Sea!

Raiders of the North Sea is a two to four player game published in 2015 by Garphill Games. It was designed by Shem Phillips with art by Mihajlo Dimitrievski. The game is about building your Viking crew, raiding settlements, and bringing back plunder for your chieftain. Raiders offers an interesting twist on the worker placement genre of games. Each player has precisely one worker—a Viking—that they can send on their turn to some unoccupied location on the board. They activate that location, getting something useful from it, and then—here’s the twist—they choose another location that has a worker, activate that location, and retrieve the worker to use on their next turn.

Place a Viking, do a thing, retrieve a different Viking, do a different thing. This simple mechanic powers a very fun game with the right balance of strategic planning and beating your opponent to the punch.