Odin's Ravens is a medium-light card game for 2 players. It is part of the Kosmos 2 player games. The premise is you are trying to fly your wooden raven across the landscape while at the same time trying to prevent your opponent's raven from reaching the end of their landscape.

What do you get?
In the box you will find a deck of landscape cards, 2 identical decks of action cards, a small deck of magic way cards, one Odin marker and 2 wooden ravens, one brown and one grey.

The cards are tall and narrow and of good quality. it helps play greatly that they made the cards narrow because they need to be placed next to each other to create the landscape you are tying to fly across. It's also kind of cool to play with non-traditional shaped cards.

Gameplay
This is a brief overview of gameplay, since it is covered so well by others.

The landscape cards each contain 2 sides, say a mountain and a river, or maybe snow and a valley. they are placed down randomly in a row of nine to start the game.
Now using the 5 cards dealt to each player the players in turn are allowed to play 3 cards from their hand to try to fly their raven as far as possible towards the end of the row.
If you have a mountain, a snow, and a river ahead of you on your side of the flight path, you need to play those 3 cards in order out of your hand to fly across them.

They can also play 3 cards out of their auxiliary deck, which at the beginning of the game is empty, but they can build up with cards from their hand which they do not play towards moving their raven.
The trick is that cards placed in the auxiliary deck may not change order, so it is important to try to plan ahead which cards you may need to complete your flight.

Unfortunately, your opponent knows you are trying to plan ahead so he may play an Odin card against you during his turn. he might flip a landscape card, or swap 2 different landscape cards so you now no longer have the card in front of you that you once had, making your auxiliary deck unusable at the moment.

But you can always use an Odin card against him. you might place the Odin marker in front of his raven, which would cause him to spend 2 identical cards to get it moved, costing him precious cards and moves in his attempt to fly to the end of the landscape. or you can also play the Odin card that lets you re-arrange your auxiliary deck.

So the dilemma arises each turn: Should i block my opponent? or should i try to fly as far as possible? also influencing my decision is the fact that each Odin card has 2 options, and i can choose only one. one is usually to my benefit, while the other is usually designed to hinder my opponent, so deciding what to do can be anguishing at times, especially if you are behind a few spaces.

Fortunately, after each turn you are allowed to add one landscape card to the end of the flight path, which is good if you are behind, it might prevent your opponent from reaching the end on his next turn. but if you are near the end, and you are ahead, adding cards might be to your detriment.

Lastly are the magic way cards. near the draw pile are a small stack of cards with a red color back. they have a small picture representing 2 of the types of cards in your hand. if you are holding a card which you feel you cannot use at the time, you can play it onto the magic way deck. if at the end of the round even if your opponent has beat you by say 2 spaces, if you happen to have played 3 cards into the magic way pile, and he has played none, then you will have beat him by 1 point!

So is it Fun??
For me, i don't care so much for heavy complex games. most of the games i play i play with my wife, and i want to have fun. And Odin's Ravens is Fun!!! It has enough tough decisions to make it challenging, but it is light enough to play a few short games, even if we are tired. Each game can last as short as 10 minutes, so we usually play 3 or 4 in a row.

My wife beats be 80% of the time, and even though it is a lighter game, because she is usually winning, my turns are often times filled with anguish and indecision.

I recommend Odin's Ravens for anyone who likes 2 player games. if you like Lost Cities you will definitely like this game and if you think Lost Cities is lacking something you will also like this game. there are so many more decisions to make.

Final score
I give Odin's Ravens 8.5/10!!!