Champions of Midgard is a game published by Grey Fox Games that has had no shortage of love. Featuring glowing reviews from the Dice Tower and featured on an episode of Tabletop, it grabbed my interest when it was described by Wil Wheaton as a mix of Lords of Waterdeep and Stone Age. These are both games I really like and, add to that the new expansions that are available for it, I decided to see how it would compare.
In Champions of Midgard, you are trying to earn the most glory over 8 rounds. Glory is earned by building up the village (resources), defeating monsters and fulfilling destiny (or goal) cards. This is done by a combination of worker placement and dice-based combat resolution against monsters threatening your village. The game feels quite tight, with only 8 rounds and normally only 3-4 workers per round meaning you have to focus on what you are doing.
Because Champions of Midgard feels so tight, allot can be dependent on the dice roles (especially when fighting the bigger monsters). The more you want to mitigate them, the more actions you need to spend to earn re-roll tokens. This is probably the biggest detractor from the game, as you can fluff key dice roles (even if you re-roll them) meaning you have lost out on allot of resources.
This is a shame because allot of the other mechanisms are quite nice. The way blame for not defending the village is assigned is what all semi-co op games should aspire too when trying to determine lose conditions (i.e. just punish the people not helping). The worker placement and collecting of dice resources feels nearly copied from Lords of Waterdeep, which isn't a bad thing (why shouldn't designs feel iterative) and collecting resources to send out for raiding feels quite thematic.
However, Stone Age has the advantage of not having each individual roll feel as critical and having the ability to stock up on tools and cards to mitigate this. Lords of Waterdeep is a very tactical game (except for those stupid Mandatory Quest Cards, which should just be reworked into negative points if uncompleted) where you aren't leaving huge scoring opportunities to chance. Compared to these, Champions of Midgard may be average to good, but won't often be a game I would choose to play above these or a bunch of other worker placement games such as Russian Railroads or Ancient World.
On a side note, it appears that the Valhalla expansion addresses most of my main issues with this game so perhaps that will elevate the game into the regular rotation for me.
2.5 out of 5 non-horned Waffles
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