a review of Harald Enoksson's "Longships".

Disclaimer: Though I did not recieve a review copy of this, I did drive the designer down to the messe Spiel 2009 in Essen. I was not, however, paid nor rewarded in any way in order to do a review. This review comes purely out of the surprise and delight in stumbling upon a nice indie board game.

Introduction
I am a long-time fan of the trade-and-plunder game Serenissima. I've only played that some two handful of times, mostly due to the game length (four hours) but also what I perceive as a rather big flaw in the design - more about that later. By a combination of lucky events, I ended up going to Essen Spiel 2009 as a driver for the indie board game designer Harald Enoksson who had lost his ride down and needed a car. I didn't expect much of the game he had designed and was baffled to see that it was similar to Serenissima in many aspects - only it conquered both flaws of that game. As the games are vaguely similar, I will draw some parallells between the games.

Brief game overview
In Longships, 2 to 6 players travel across the North Sea on a 5x5 grid, trading with and plundering Norway, Denmark, England and Scotland. The goal of the game is to be the player with the most number of ships when the game ends. In order to build a ship, a player needs all four commodities (thralls, fur, cloth and mushrooms), but each country produces only 2 out of the four; therefore players need to trade or steal to get them all. As the game goes by, players may sacrifice goods in order to draw god cards of which there are four types, each in their own draw pile. Each draw pile of 13 cards contains one christianity card, and the game ends when all four christianity cards are drawn, or when a players build his seventh longship.

Components
Being an indie game, the components are of lesser quality than a commercial product. The game comes in a nice box with a game board, cards, commodity cubes, a die, a chess piece and ship and player tokens in cardboard. The board is an A2 map with one country in each corner. The quality of the board leaves nothing to wish for, the picture itself however, is a pixelly map representation that could have been a lot better. I happen to know that this was a last resort, as the illustrator didn't deliver, but the poor picture of the board map is still a fact. The cards and cubes are nicely done, and so are the double-sided cardboard tokens. In a commercial product, I would have expected plastic boats with slots for the cubes, and perhaps flags to mark ship owner, but in this indie product players have to make do with flat cardboard tokens to put the cubes on.

Gameplay
All players start with one longship in one of the countries. The countries are freshly plundered, and therefore hostile to the player or players who start there. Each player in turn takes a goods cube from the start country, until all players have four cubes when the game starts.

A turn consists roughly of: 1) move ships, 2) battle/plunder and 3) sacrifice goods to the gods, in that order. Trade and use of god cards, however, can normally be done at any time during the turn.

Ship movement - affecting the wind
The ship movement is an interesting mechanism, as it depends on which direction the wind is blowing - and this can be adjusted a bit on each player's turn. The game board is a 5x5 square grid with a harbour (country) in each corner, and it doubles as being both a physical representation of where the boats are, but also an indicator of the direction in which the wind blows, having a wind marker to indicate wind direction. The wind marker starts in the middle of the game board, and at the start of each player turn, before moving his/her boats, the player may move the wind marker one orthogonal step, and the arrows on the square where the wind marker stands indicate in which directions the boats may be moved:

Picture courtesy of Herald Enoksson
As you can see, the middle space on the board has arrows in all eight directions, so when the wind marker is in the middle of the board, boats may be moved one step in any direction. The square north of the middle square has arrows west, east, northwest, northeast and a double arrow north, meaning the boat can be moved two steps north or one step in any of the other arrows' directions. The square northeast of the middle square has only arrows north, northeast and east, so with the wind marker standing there, the boats are a bit limited.

What this wind mechanism does is basically letting players limit the next player's options for ship movement. If the wind marker is two steps from the middle square, it's a storm (the square has white arrows instead of blue). If a player's ships are out on the sea (not in a harbour) after movement and the wind marker is standing on white arrows, that player's (and only that player's) ships are damaged. The next player can of course move back the wind marker to a 'safe' (non-storm) square on his turn, but it severly limits the movement possibilities, so there's a good incentive to cause a storm if your ships will reach a harbour during movement. There are also the wind extremes, three spaces from the middle square. These are also storms, and having the wind marker there will cause serious trouble for the next player, as the only wind marker options are storm squares.

The wind marker may only be moved 1 step during a player's turn, if the player doesn't play a god card that lets him move the wind marker again.

Trading - an ever-changing market
The trading system in Longships is interesting. When entering a harbour, you may sell any of the goods on your ship to get other goods in return - even if the harbour is hostile towards you. For one cube, you will get zero, one or two cubes in return, depending on the harbour's supply of the two concerned goods. If the difference between the good you're selling and the good you're buying is four or more, you will get two cubes for one. For example, if the harbour has no thralls (yellow) but four or more furs (blue) and you're selling a thrall, you'll get two furs. If the difference is two or three, for example if the harbour has one thrall (yellow) and four furs (blue), you'll get one for one. If the difference is one or less, for example, if the harbour has two thralls (yellos) and three furs or less, you'll get nothing. You can always donate the good if you wish, but you won't get anything in return.

And there's a twist: the very moment a harbour has one cube each of the 'import goods' (the two commodities the country doesn't produce) they will consume those goods and produce 3 of each of the 'export goods' (the commodities they do produce). Trade makes the countries prosper. A nice combination is to trade in goods so that the harbour consumes and produces - and then plunder them when they're rich.

Battle and plunder - trusting the Viking-treasured luck.
One thing the vikings valued highly (or at least the stories say so) was a sailor's luck. In the Swedish classic viking novel Röde Orm (Red Snake), they said that against magic, there is counter-magic and against bad weather there are sacrifices, but against bad luck, there is no protection, therefore the luck of a man is of highest importance.
In Longships, the die is used only when battling another longship or when plundering - but it's not totally random in either situation.

To plunder a port, a player rolls the die and takes that number of goods cubes from the port. However, one can never plunder more than half of a port's quantity of a certain commodity. So, if a port has four blue, three yellow and one red, the maximum plunder loot would be two blue and one yellow, so any roll of 3 or above would yield the maximum result. If you plunder with several boats simultaneously, roll all dice and add them up.

Plundering a port is an easy way to get goods without losing any - what you will lose, however, is the ability to build and/or repair ships in that harbour, probably for the remainder of the game. There is no way to lose a hostility marker in a country at will - it will only go away when the country is hostile to more players than the limit - which is half the number of players rounded up. In a 5 player game, each country can be hostile to a maximum of 3 player. When they become hostile to the fourth player, the least powerful of the three previous (the player with the least amount of longships) will be forgiven. But there is no way the hostility markers will go away as long as you're doing well, so plundering all over the North Sea will lose you the game. Also, once a country is plundered, they run into the hills and hide, and no one can trade nor plunder there until the attacker has left the port.

Attacking other ships is dangerous business. The attacker rolls a die and on 1 or 2, the attacker gets damaged. On 5 or 6 the defender gets damaged. On a 3, nothing happens, and on a 4, both ships are damaged. The winner takes half of the damaged ship's cargo, and the loser ends up with a damaged ship which is bad business - a damaged ship can only carry 4 commodities instead of 8, cannot move double-spaces and gets a penalty when battling or plundering. A battle card will give you +1 to the die roll, though, which changes the odds radically. While you normally can't play god cards out of turn, a red god card (battle card) can be played when you're attacked, so people are careful to attack players with a lot of Tyr cards.

Also, attacking a viking near one of his non-hostile harbours will count as a hostile action against that country, and that can cost you precious time. Your best chance is to attack other vikings in no-mans-land waters, or in waters where you or the opponent is already hated.

If a damaged ship gets damaged again, it's sunk and all of its cargo goes to the winner. If a player starts his turn with no ships, he'll resurrect as a carbon copy of the weakest viking - the same number of ships, commodities, and hostility status, the resurrection action being his whole turn.

Sacrifices to the gods - game end trigger
So, sailing, trading, plundering and battling - to perform all this efficiently you will need some godly help to increase your chances. Players may last in their turn sacrifice (discard) a commodity to draw a god card of the corresponding colour. Thralls are sacrificed to Odin (yellow), furs to Thor (blue), mushrooms (you eat them) to Tyr (red) and cloth to Freya (green). Each god card stack consists of 13 cards, of which one is the end game-triggering christianity card. Of the remaining twelve cards in each deck, six are of the expected colour, and then two cards each of the other colours. Meaning, in Tyr's stack (red cards), six are battle cards (red), but two are wind cards (blue), two are repair cards (yellow) and two are prosperity cards (green). And in Thor's deck (blue), you'll find six wind cards (blue) and two each of the others.

Red battle cards are played before you roll the die and will give you +1 to the die roll when battling or +2 to the die roll when plundering. Blue wind cards can be played anytime during your turn to move the wind marker again; yellow repair cards are played any time during your turn to repair one of your ships and green prosperity cards are played anytime during your turn to add 2 cubes each of the export commodity of a country of your choice - a very powerful card to play just before trade or plunder. There is no limit to the number of god cards you can play during one turn, but you can never play a god card you have just drawn.

All these cards are immensely useful - a player with a handful of god cards will be very much in control of his destiny. But as mentioned earlier, the christianity card in each deck is the game end trigger - once all four christianity cards are drawn, the game immediately ends, and the player with the most (non-damaged) longships wins the game (commodities/cards being the first tie breaker).

And so the game goes on - moving the wind marker, moving ships, trading, plundering and battling until the vikings finally give in to those insistant missionaries and the game ends.

Verdict - some comparisons to Serenissima
I must say I was largely impressed with Longships. I have loved Serenissima's way of dealing with the combination of trade and piracy, but I never liked the sudden pirate extravaganza in the last round, just because it's the last round. I also wasn't too fond of the game board growing less and less interesting as the ports were filled and you were left with less and less abilities to trade. The game time of 4+ hours has also been a threshold.

In Longships, the market is always changing instead of being gradually destroyed. The game time is much shorter - about 60 to 90 minutes (a bit longer if you're 5 or 6 players) and mostly, the game end trigger can be expected but is sudden - and your tactics don't radically change just because the game end is near. You will want many ships to be efficient, and the amount of ships is what will determine the winner. Sure, there will be the occasional "I'll sacrifice these 4 yellow cubes to draw 4 yellow cards, so the game ends!" which might seem to be a bit out of character, but not the "In this last round, money is worth so little anyway, so I'll just pump up 5 ships loaded with soldiers and attack a random port to seaze its victory points" weird change-of-heart that is Serenissima.

Having played some ten times, it's obvious that a smart combination of trade and battle wins the game - plunder is good but will invariably get you hated in the country, limiting the places where you can get repaired for free and build more ships, whereas attacking an already hated viking won't get you hated, but is more dangerous (without the correct god card at least). It will get you hostile with the player, of course.

The balance between efficient trade and a lot of sacrifice is very interesting - the god cards are all four very powerful and pretty well balanced, with perhaps the battle cards being most powerful due to their frightening aura - attacking a player with a lot of red cards is dangerous business. But what card is most powerful actually varies more on how the players tackle the game - if a lot of players plunder, the prosperity cards are wonderfully efficient, and the wind cards can win you the game if efficient trade is what you want. The penalties you get for being damaged is enough that having one of two repair cards up your sleeve can decide your fate. Once damaged, your ship is a sitting target for everyone, so being able to repair quickly can save you from that second attack that will sink you.

All in all, Longships is a fast and very interesting experience that stands the test of many consecutive plays. Variable tactics, and the interacting mechanisms makes the game interesting on any number of players. Although I would say the game shines most on 3-5, it works very well as a 2 player game. Had this been a commercial product, I would have complained about the boats being cardbord tokens, and it might have lowered my esteem for the game. But as an indie product I'm prepared to overlook that fact and see only to the game itself. And I can only say I'm both impressed and surprised - this is undoubtedly better than most.

Edited: Typos and added a picture

Nice review, glad i was able to get a copy of the game

What I also really like in this game is the (typical for an idependently produced game) "openness": Vikings can also trade with each other in a freestyle manner: Goods for goods or goods for promises to do something - the only restriction here is: No haggling. Any larger company would try to eliminate such an "ambiguity in the rules" - they want to make rules "straight".

I really hope, some bigger, but still kind of "independent" publisher will have a look at this and eventually produce a nice edition with 3D-ships and a "medieval map", but without a too "nice" look (you know, these very colourful fairy-tale-like middle ages ... ). Any ideas, which company this could be?

I also have to add to your review, that the art on the cards is quite nice (at least to me). It is taken from 19th century illustrations and are different from other games.

Freya card (back) and wind card.

Indeed, the cards are nice. And one can always hope that a larger company picks up the game - with this quality let's just hope it's a mere matter of time.