Matthew BaileyNote: This is a short really early legacy review before I started posting longer form review in our Facebook Group.
Continuing our theme of playing games designed for children today we decided to play another 2 Kinderspiel des Jahres (kids board game of the year) winners.
First was Valley of the Vikings that won in 2019. Valley of the Vikings involves you setting up barrels and hitting a ball to knock them over. Whichever ones barrel gets knocked over moves down the track and gains or steals coins.
The strategy comes from trying to knock the barrels down to move the pieces you want to maximise your chances of getting coins or stealing coins. But whoever’s barrel gets knocked over moves regardless of whose turn it is often making the game feel very passive.
The game itself has lots of lovely pieces and considering how simple of a game it is the production value is very high.it has these awesome cardboard Vikings boats that are purely there to put your coins in. For a Haba game, the box is massive and annoyingly doesn’t fit well on a normal board game shelf (for those of you that care). Equally once everything is made it doesn’t fit nicely back in the box and requires some dismantling.
I really wanted to like this and while Jack(6) and Toby(3) found hitting the ball fun it is all very random and in one of our games, the non-player character actually won by chance.
Unless it’s super cheap not one I would recommend and I am surprised it won the Kinderspiel des Jahres.
I would however recommend my second game of the day that I will post shortly and has many similarities.
