Odin's Ravens



This review is intended to be comprehensive – below you can find detailed descriptions of the game mechanics, components, and theme, as well as my own thoughts on the game and what I like or dislike about it. If you’re looking primarily for a description or recommendation of the game, feel free to skip past the nitty-gritty parts of the review. I can say right off that it’s an excellent game. Read on to find out more.


Contents:


1.) Overview
2.) Theme
3.) What’s in the Box?
4.) Rules
5.) Components: Rules and Use.
A.) The Ravens
B.) Landscape Cards
C.) Flight Cards
D.) Odin Cards
E.) Magic Way Cards
F.) The Odin Marker
6.) Quality of Components
7.) Thoughts on the Theme
8.) Thoughts on the Gameplay
A.) The Auxiliary Stack
B.) Flexible Movement
C.) The Magic Way
D.) Extending the Landscape
E.) Odin Cards
9.) The Final Word


Overview

Odin’s Ravens is a medium-light two-player game that takes 20-40 minutes to play. Games will be on the longer side if both players are experienced (or “clever,” as the front of the box says). Gameplay moves along at a brisk pace and is usually relaxed, though a contest between two clever ravens can have moments of intensity. When I say that the game is “medium-light,” I mean that the rules are simple and easy to learn, but that the game is involving and elegantly put together.

Theme

You and your opponent play as Hugin and Mugin (siblings?, best friends?, cute couple?), Odin’s two pet ravens. Each morning the Norse god sends the two of you out to observe the land, gather information, and report back to him. See below under “thoughts on the theme” for a description of how the theme ‘feels’ while playing and for how the theme fits with the mechanics of the game.



What’s in the Box?

2 wooden ravens, one brown and one gray.
1 Odin marker (a small wooden cylinder with a purple lightning bolt on top)
40 Landscape cards
2 player decks, one with brown backs and one with gray, each including:
25 flight cards
8 Odin cards
6 magic way cards.





Rules

In Odin’s Ravens, players are racing to get to the end of the ‘board’ first. At the start of the game, players lay out a single row of nine landscape cards, making sure that neither player’s landscape track has two of any terrain type in a row. This is the board. Players play cards from their hand to move along the track, alter it, shorten it, or extend it. Only two cards directly affect your opponent: one allows you to move them back one space, and one allows you to ‘block’ them with the Odin marker, making it more difficult for them to go forward. Though these options are important parts of the game, players will spend relatively little of their time trying to interfere with the other raven, making Odin’s Ravens a less confrontational game than some.

The object of the game is to reach 12 points, which normal takes 1-6 rounds, though games taking 1, 5, or 6 rounds are rare (I’ve played the game about 10 times and have yet to see one end that soon or take that long. In theory, the game can last up to 23 rounds, but the probability of such a scenario occuring is infinitesimal). There are two ways to get points in Odin’s Ravens, each occurring at the end of a round. When a player reaches the end of the landscape, the round ends and that player gets points for each space between them and their opponent. The player who has the most cards on the Magic Way gets three points, regardless of how many cards he has played. So, a player could win the race by one or two and lose the Magic Way, thus losing the round. If a round ends and players are tied on the Magic Way, neither gets the three point bonus. If players reach 12 points simultaneously, resulting in a tie, then the player who won the last race is the winner.



Players begin the game by drawing five cards from their deck. On each player’s turn, she may play up to three cards from her hand. In rare instances, a player may want to discard a card without using it: this counts as one of the three cards played. Players also have the option of placing their cards face down in an “auxiliary stack.” This also counts as one of the three cards played in a turn. In addition to the three cards played from their hand, a player may play up to three cards from their auxiliary stack. Cards from the stack must be played in top-down order. The auxiliary stack is a crucial part of the game, because it allows for delayed moves and hedged bets. The total number of cards (including discards and additions to the stack) that a player can play during their turn is six, three from their hand and three from their stack. When players have finished playing cards, they have the option of extending the landscape by one card. Once they decide whether or not to extend the landscape, they replenish their hand back to 5 cards and their turn is over.


Components: Rules and Use

Below I have included detailed and concise descriptions of each game component: what it’s for and how it works.

Ravens



Each player has a wooden raven that they move along the landscape as they play cards from their hand.


Landscape cards




At the start of the game, nine of these cards are placed in a row. These cards are the ‘board’ in Odin’s Ravens. Each card has a top and bottom half so that each player faces her own route on which to move her raven. These routes are made up of five different landscapes: rivers, fields, mountains, tundra, and forests. A landscape card may have different terrains on its top and bottom half, or both terrains may be the same. Players play flight cards from their hands to advance their raven along the landscape, and may also use Odin cards to remove cards from the track, add them, or rotate them. At the end of their turn, players have the option to extend the landscape by one card.


Flight Cards

Flight cards make up the bulk of each player’s deck. Each flight card depicts one of the five landscapes and may be used to advance a player’s raven along her route. For example, if a player’s route begins with tundra, she may play a single tundra flight card to place her raven on the landscape. If a player does not have the flight card that she needs to advance, she may play two flight cards of another type to move forward one space. For instance, a player might play two river flight cards to move onto a mountain space. Conversely, a single flight card is all that is needed to traverse a row of identical landscape cards. If the next three landscape cards in a player’s path are all mountains, then that player may play a single mountain flight card and move forward three spaces. Flight cards may also be played to the “Magic Way.” When played to the Magic Way, flight cards do not advance a player, but make them eligible for a point bonus at the end of the round.

Odin Cards



Odin cards allow players to affect the game with several special abilities. Each Odin card contains two options from which to choose. There are four types of Odin cards in each deck (distribution: 3,2,2,1).

Odin Card 1: Move your raven forward one space or your opponent’s raven back one space.

Odin Card 2: Swap any two unoccupied landscape cards or place the Odin marker on an unoccupied landscape card.

Odin Card 3: Place two cards at the end of the track or rearrange your auxiliary stack (only one in the deck. Nice design choice here, as this is very occasionally a good option).

Odin Card 4: Rotate one unoccupied landscape card 180 degrees or remove one landscape card from the board.

The rules define an “unoccupied landscape card” as one that does not have a raven or the Odin marker on it. Also, the Odin card that lets you move forward one space does not allow you to move forward if the Odin marker is blocking your path. Both the rotation card and the swap card allow players to create rows of the same landscape along their route.


Magic Way Cards



There are six magic way cards in the game. Each card depicts two different landscape types or a landscape type and Odin. At the beginning of the game, the cards are placed in a stack next to the beginning of the landscape track. The first one is turned up, and remains until the end of the round. During that round, players compete to see who can explore the ‘magic way’ more thoroughly. At the end of the round, whoever has played more cards to the magic way will receive three points. Players can ‘win’ the magic way and lose the race, in which case both players would receive points for the round. At the start of a new round, players turn up the next magic way card.


The Odin Marker



Throughout the course of the game, players will have the option to ‘block’ their opponent by placing the Odin marker on the next space along their route. The rules specify four ways in which Odin can be removed. In order of most to least efficient:

1.) A player use the appropriate Odin card to move the Odin marker (usually placing it in front of the other player).

2.) A player may play an additional flight card of the appropriate type. So, if Odin is on a river landscape, a player may play two river flight cards to remove Odin and move forward.

3.) A player may play the appropriate flight card and an additional pair of a different type. So, in the above example, a player could play one river and two mountain flight cards to remove Odin and move forward.

4.) If a player does not have the appropriate flight card, she may play two pairs of other flight cards. So, in the above example, a player could play two fields and two tundra to remove Odin from the river space and move forward.


Quality of Components

Odin’s Ravens has solid presentation. The cards are taller and narrower than standard playing cards, but easy to handle and fun to play with. They are printed on quality stock with crisp and serene artwork (not over-the-top, but not bland either). Each of the landscapes is beautifully drawn, and Odin himself looks about like you’d expect the Norse god to look, complete with horned helm and grizzled grey beard. Personally, I would have enjoyed different poses or facial expressions on the four different Odin cards, but this is a minor quibble. The wooden pieces are simple and unostentatious (no Battle Lore or D&D miniatures here); the two ravens look like silhouettes about a centimeter thick, and the Odin Marker is a small light-wood cylinder with a purple lightning bolt across the top. If you are so inclined, you can turn your ravens upside down and play a game of “Odin’s Bunnies.” Everything fits snuggly in the box, and the game could even be carried more compactly in a small zip-lock bag, making it great for travel. The rules (Rio Grande edition) are quite clear and easy to follow.

Thoughts on the Theme

The theme of Odin’s Ravens provides a sense of camaraderie: Hugin and Mugin are working toward a common goal, to gather information for their benevolent master. The competitive aspect of the game – to see who can complete the morning’s expedition faster – is quite friendly. It is as if the ravens decided to ‘spice things up’ or entertain themselves by turning the morning routine into a race. This makes it a good game for couples, since even though you are trying to win, the atmosphere of the game is one of collaboration. And the mechanics, by and large, bear this out.

The game mechanics are fairly well fitted to the theme. Players will spend most of their time working to advance their own ravens, though there are ways to slow down the opponent. In particular, one of the Odin cards lets players place the Odin marker in front of their opponent, which requires that player to play extra cards to progress. Thematically, I find this aspect of the game amusing; I like to think that Odin has checked in with one of the ravens, say Mugin, during his morning flight, and that Mugin tells Odin some cock-and-bull story the crux of which only Hugin knows: before you know it, Odin is pressing Hugin for the scoop, while Mugin soars ahead. Now to be sure, I just made all of that up. But as long as it’s fairly easy to imaginatively reconcile particular game mechanics with the overall theme, that’s all part of the fun.

There are some mechanics that don’t make a whole lot of sense in the context of the theme, but these are fairly unobtrusive. For example, one of the Odin cards lets you move the other player back a space, and since Odin wants both of you to gather information, it’s hard for me to figure out ‘what is happening’ (thematically) for Odin to be sending one of the ravens backwards. But this move doesn’t happen all that often, and the Odin card that allows it also allows a player to move themselves one forward, which is easy to imagine as a favor from Odin. Of course, there is also the broad problem of the fluid landscape. Odin may be a god, but I’m not sure what exactly would be going on for the landscape to be changing (removing, rotating, adding landscape cards). Nevertheless, the underlying idea – that the special abilities of the game are triggered by Odin – works well and feels right.

The Magic Way is the one aspect of the game that should have been more carefully linked to the theme. (Note: This might be a simple translation issue. I don’t speak German, and I don’t know how the Magic Way was described in the original edition of the game.) The simple fact that it is called “The Magic Way” indicates that the designers had something in mind, but what exactly is left to conjecture. I can easily imagine that, when playing a card to the magic way, your raven is taking a closer look at the landscape, gathering more detailed information for Odin. Conceiving it that way, it makes sense that you can play a flight card for points without moving forward. However, that conception also makes it odd that you can play a card to the magic way whether or not you are on that terrain type. For instance, if the Magic Way shows a mountain and a river, you can play those cards if you are on a tundra, field, or forest, in which case “taking a closer look” isn’t the greatest fit. “Taking a closer look” also ignores the “magic” part altogether. Are the ravens exploring not only the earthly landscape but some additional ‘magic’ plane or realm? Who knows? In terms of the gameplay, the Magic Way is a key part of the mechanics (as any good Eurogamer knows, multiple ways to score always makes things more interesting, even in a relatively light two-player game), and it doesn’t seem like it would have taken more than a paragraph in the rulebook to explain what it is.

Overall, the gaps I’ve noted above don’t interfere with my enjoyment of the game or with its strong sense of theme. Odin’s Ravens is not a “dry Euro” or a Knizia game (good as some of them are); the theme is well implemented rather than tacked-on.


Thoughts on the Gameplay

The Auxiliary Stack

In terms of pure game mechanics, Odin’s Ravens is incredibly well thought-out. Despite being a card-draw, hand-management based game, very little luck is involved. This is where the auxiliary stack mechanic shines. If you don’t have the flight card matching the next terrain in the landscape, you can look ahead and play cards to the stack that you will need next turn or the turn after. In my experience, turns crop up every now and then in which a player’s entire action is to place three cards to their stack. As often as not, the following turn they are set up to play five or six cards. Without the auxiliary stack, players would be heavily dependent on the luck of the draw and thus prone to getting stuck while the other, luckier player soared ahead. The option to discard would mitigate this to some extent, but players would be discarding so often in order draw the necessary cards that as much as half of each player’s deck would go unused. With both the stack and the discard mechanic in place, players can delay moves and, in rare cases, discard a card that is not likely to be useful in the near future (in most of the games I’ve played, including a particularly intense one, there have been no discards).

Flexible Movement

Other mechanics combine with the auxiliary stack to keep each player viable nearly regardless of what they draw. For instance, playing a pair of flight cards on the wrong terrain will let you continue forward, but you pay a small price in efficiency, and Odin’s Ravens is all about sustained efficiency. Thus, players may technically have the option to move forward using a pair, but may choose to play to their stack in hopes of a more efficient move next turn. And if they choose to do so, they will still have the option to use the pair next turn, probably in combination with the cards in their stack. In other words, even if you are counting on a certain draw, other courses of action will be open if you do not get the exact card(s) you wanted.

The Magic Way

The Magic Way mechanic combines with the stack and flexible movement mechanics described above to make things even more interesting. Consider the following example. At the start of the game, the first terrain on your side of the landscape is a forest, and you don’t have a forest flight card in your hand. To the uninitiated, this might seem like a frustrating and unlucky beginning to the game. But say you have two cards in your hand that are shown on the Magic Way, and you also have the flight card matching the second terrain in the landscape. You can play a very effective turn without even getting on the board: two cards go to the Magic Way, and one card goes to the auxiliary stack. Even if your opponent has the most optimal hand and can move three spaces forward, he will have to catch up to you on the Magic Way or risk losing three points, and you will have up to four moves next turn, while he will still have three. The Magic Way in effect gives each player two landscape types (or Odin) which are always viable plays. And because of this, cards listed on the Magic Way are often good choices for the auxiliary stack. Imagine that the Magic Way is tied, that on your next turn you might be able to win the race, and that a forest is one of the remaining landscapes to be traversed. A forest is also shown on the Magic Way. Playing the forest to your stack is a good move, because if you draw a card that lets you move past the forest (another forest card, or a couple of different Odin cards), then on your (hopefully) final turn, the forest card in your stack can be played to the Magic Way so that you win not only the race, but the Magic Way as well. This example could vary in a couple of ways. If you don’t draw another card that will get you past the forest, you can simply play the forest from your stack and win the race with the Magic Way tied. Or, imagine that you are one behind on the Magic Way. Then you can win the race and tie the Magic Way at the last moment, so that only you get points for the round.

The Magic Way helps nullify the luck-of-the-draw aspect of the game, but because it also provides an alternative method of scoring, players have more choice in how they use it. For instance, since the goal of the game is to get to 12 points first over several races, an experienced player will almost always concede the Magic Way if they can win the race by 4 or more points (I’ve even accepted a tie before, where I win the race by three and my opponent wins the Magic Way. In fact, if I’m ahead in the overall score, say, 6 to 3, I’ll accept a win-by-two while losing the Way, since in the overall score I’m still winning 8 to 6 and have a good chance of closing out the game in the next round). Winning both the race and the Way is satisfying, and very effective when you can do so, but it can also tempt you to keep the race going longer than you should, giving your opponent the opportunity to upset you. Emphasis on the Magic Way may also change near the end of the game. Imagine, for instance, that the score is 6 to 9, and that players are beginning a new round. The player with nine points can lose the race by five and still win the game if they win the Magic Way, so that particular round will have a different feel to it.

Extending the Landscape




Odin’s Ravens would essentially be a broken game without a mechanic that extended the landscape. Above I mentioned the importance of the auxiliary stack (delayed moves) in the game. Without the end-of-turn option to extend the landscape, the ability to delay moves would be more or less null, since a single turn of set-up could be enough for the other player to win. This is where the landscape extension comes in. If a player feels on the defensive – needs a couple of turns to get an edge – then extending the landscape serves the obvious purpose of delaying the victory of their opponent, but it also could provide an advantage for the extending player. The player who extends the landscape can choose how to orient it, often allowing them to create stretches of consecutive landscape (two mountains in a row, etc.), in effect only extending the landscape for their opponent. Even when this is not an option, there are a couple of things to take into account when extending. Obviously, players would avoid creating consecutive stretches for their opponents. Less obviously, it is usually to a player’s advantage to orient a landscape card so that the landscape facing their opponent is one that is shown on the Magic Way. This way, the opponent may have to play a flight card to move which could have potentially given them the lead on the Magic Way. This range of options prevents landscape extension from being a dry or automatic part of the mid to late game. Also, because the mid to late game is a space in which either player is often on the verge of winning, landscape extension can be tricky; there is often the feeling that you could win next turn, but if there is any palpable possibility that your opponent could win in the meantime, then extension is a must. There can be an element of gambling here, since you can only judge the number of cards an opponent could play (there stack size is crucial) and estimate how many moves they could feasibly accomplish.

The ability to influence (pretty strongly) the length of the game doesn’t create endless races, though it can create longer and more intense ones. I’ve played one race that took nearly half an hour by itself and used every landscape card save one, but this is rare (and rather exhilarating when it happens). If players are on top of their game, they should be moving two to three spaces, on average (taking the stack into account), each turn, while they can only extend the landscape by a single card. Strong play will reduce the average movement, but not down to one move per turn. For instance, the Odin marker can be a pretty big wrench in the gears; placing the Odin Marker in front of the other player is the game’s only strong confrontational / offensive move. If you are on the defensive, using an Odin card to extend the landscape by two (in addition to the optional end-of-turn extension) can really slow down an opponent and while potentially creating an advantageous stretch of terrain for you. In spite of such moves, the race will inevitably reach it’s end. I do not think it was an accident that the longest race I’ve played used nearly the entire landscape deck without forcing a reshuffle; clearly a lot of thought went into the proportions of Odin’s Ravens: total deck sizes and the ratio of each card to the overall deck.

Longer games also have a built-in deterrent to landscape extension. For example, during the longest race that I’ve played so far, each player came to dread the appearance of another field or mountain on the landscape, because those cards were shown on the Magic Way. A player deck may be completely used and then reshuffled during the course of the race, but the flight cards played to the Magic Way will be drained from the deck. The player decks are smaller than the landscape deck, and their rate of use is three times faster. Thus, in the long race mentioned above, each player was on his third time through the player deck, and each player had played six or seven cards to the Magic Way. When a field or a mountain came up, we often had to find alternative ways to get around it: rotating the card (not necessarily for the creation of consecutive stretches, as would usually be the case), removing it – even if it was in front of both players (and so doing both of you a favor), using Odin to move over it, or using pairs. Players become weary of extending the landscape when there is a chance that the card they draw may do more harm than good. Here again, we see the Magic Way functioning in a number of different interlocking ways to make an involving game.

Odin Cards

Perhaps more than any other element, the Odin cards really invigorate the gameplay. Proportion has been well calculated: there are two of each Odin card, so that each does not feel like a ‘one-shot-wonder,’ but only one Odin card for every four flight cards, so that Odin cards genuinely feel like “special” abilities, and the use of them by an opponent is not a given each turn. Moreover, each Odin card provides players with two options, and these have been thoughtfully paired. For instance, the first couple of times I played the game, the ability to place the Odin marker seemed significantly more powerful than its companion ability of swapping two unoccupied landscape cards. The first time I realized that the swap ability could create not one, but two stretches of consecutive landscape, I saw that the choices on that particular Odin card are actually well balanced. A good swap has, on occasion, allowed me to move six spaces with three cards (the swap creates two stretches of three, and a single flight card allows me to move past each stretch), which is a real haymaker in Odin’s Ravens. Two more of the pairings include like abilities, which sensibly isolates the potential to use both at the same time. For example, the same Odin card lets you rotate or remove landscape cards, so you will never be able to use or combine these moves more than twice. Had these options been on different cards, the potential for ridiculous leaps across the board would have really throne off the measured quality of the gameplay. Along the same lines, another Odin card allows you to move one forward or move your opponent one backward. The last Odin card is probably the ‘weakest’ one in the sense that it will see less use than the others, but the abilities provided can be absolutely crucial. As mentioned above, extending the track by two is a much needed defensive move, and the ability to rearrange your auxiliary stack, though the least-used of all Odin abilities, can come in handy from time to time if a landscape alteration really interferes with your set-up.


The Final Word

Ultimately, some fairly simple qualities may predispose you to like or dislike this game. As noted above, this is not a highly confrontational game. I much prefer games that tend this way; I like to be involved in what I’m doing – to feel like I’m playing well – without being overly burdened with what my opponent is doing. In other words, I like to do a better job than them, rather than actively screwing up the job that they are doing. I’m a pretty laid-back gamer, and as long as I’m enjoying myself, the outcome of the game isn’t terribly important (you won’t catch me making “oh, if I had just done such-and-such I would have had you” comments).

Odin’s Ravens has little in the way of long-term strategy. The most forward-looking strategy I can think of is making a couple of landscape extensions early in the game before there is an active need for it, the idea being that it will probably be extended at least a couple of times anyway, so you might as well be the one doing it. Even this, however, is questionable, since it precludes speedy victory and assumes a more protracted match. It could be said against the game that players will usually be able to see their ‘best’ options, dulling the competitive edge. I reject this, though, because of the ‘usually.’ The winner of Odin’s Ravens is the player whose decisions are consistently good ones. You have to stay alert and keep your performance top-notch. In the most abstract terms (and remember, I think the theme is compelling) a win is simply better efficiency over time. As a result, the mid to late game has a razor’s-edge feel to it. You and your opponent duck and weave, looking for an opening, for a chance to land the knockout blow.

Odin’s Ravens is a great value. While the range of gameplay options will become familiar to you after half-a-dozen times through the game, the particulars of each race will continue to feel new. It is a relatively quick game, and can be played casually over lunch, though occasionally you might find yourself in a much more intense competition than you bargained for. This particular capacity for surprise is a real plus, in my book. Compelling two-player games are also hard to come by, making Odin’s Ravens that much more appreciable.

Score:

Components: 8.5/10
Theme: 8.5/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Replay value: 8.5/10

Overall: 9/10

Overall score is not an average. I use BoardGameGeek’s score descriptions to assign an overall score.