A Feast for Odin – a solo review

Hoist your sails, raise your ales, tonight we feast for Odin! Grind your axe, weave your flax, tonight we feast for Odin! Place a tile, goods to stockpile, tonight we feast for Odin!

Name: A Feast for Odin (year)
Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Publisher: Z-Man Games, Feuerland Spiele, White Goblin Games (NL)
Play type: worker placement

What the game is about

A Feast for Odin is a worker placement game of tile laying and resource gathering. You start with a patch of land that you need to fill with various goods you can grow, raise, raid and plunder. You also have a banquet table with an increasing amount of guests as more and more viking clans join in on the feasting. As we all know it would be very rude to deny them their food after their arduous journey. But while they’re here, though, they can help you out in various ways. At the end of the game, your success is measured by how much you have filled your patch of land and other real estate as well – a conquered island or barns filled to the brim with goods and livestock will increase your score as you prepare for Valhalla.

How the game works

You are in control of an ever increasing array of workers to place at various spots on a seemingly enormous board with over sixty options! Luckily all these options are grouped together for clarity’s sake. You have a worker placement spot for gathering resources where you can place 1 worker, 2 workers, 3 workers, and 4 workers. More workers is usually more powerful, but it’ll cost you – workers, in this case.

The resources you gather come in various shapes and colors, with orange and red being the most common (and edible), and green and blue being the most valuable. There’s plenty of fun to be had with resources – upgrading, expanding, even breeding various animals. There is, however, always a balance of how much (and which) resources you want to spend and which you are going to permanently place on your player board. By the end of the game you need to have covered up all the -1 spots there, but surrounding certain other spots can also grant you additional resources which could come in handy on later turns.

When you play this game solo you use two different colors of workers; one is available to you on odd turns, the other on even turns. After you are done with your turn you leave the workers you placed this turn, blocking spots for your next turn. You don’t play against an AI or Automa, you basically play against your past self! This creates an interesting dynamic – there is only so much blocking as you allow there to be, and if you plan correctly, this will hardly ever be a problem. Plus, there’s always a ton to do even when you have blocked yourself out of your desired spot the turn before.

A Feast for Odin is to Caverna as Caverna is to Agricola; it has familiar elements of resource management, production phases, worker placement, and action cards – but it is so much more than that. The spatial aspect has been amped up and that creates a lot of interesting decisions. You don’t judge resources purely on their value, but also on their shape and how you can fit it into your tableau. Yet there’s no reason to be scared – A Feast for Odin is a surprisingly smooth and even relaxing experience given what’s under the hood.

Theme, art & flavor

You are gathering up the viking clans in your realm to feast in the name of the Allfather, Odin. I don’t think Odin envisioned a feast at his behest to be all about placing items of various shapes and sizes in a grid or about creating a particular orderliness with which the food is served (not to mention that apparently money can satisfy hunger as much as food can), but there you go.

All kidding aside, as with other Rosenberg games I am familiar with, the theme is present but doesn’t really steer gameplay. I do have to make a note of the extensive almanac this game comes with in which Rosenberg details how game decisions (the shape of certain objects, for example) came to be based on existing lore. That’s fantastic! So while the game itself doesn’t feel all that thematic, all of its background does make thematic sense – and that in turn makes playing the game feel like an experience grounded in actual history.

Another thing I feel like I should mention is the die – something that some some euro gamers scoff at. It really fits in the game – you use it for hunting and setting traps, two acts that can’t with the best of intentions be called deterministic. You never know if you will catch something, and what; at least you’ll always get a reward, even if you fail. That’s not the case with real life hunting (unless you count the alcohol beverage you console yourself afterwards with)!

How does it play?

As you might have noticed, I am merely glancing over what you can do in this game – while the worker placement actions are very straight forward once you know how to ‘read’ the board, all their implications are far from it. You are constantly evaluating how much a given thing – a resource, a worker, a boat, a card, hunting materials – is worth now versus what it could yield one, two or even three turns from now. There’s so much to do that anything is possible, really – you only really need a plan and stick to it. I’d even go so far and call A Feast for Odin a sandbox worker placement. The world is your oyster… or whale, or wheat, whatever.

You could say that this game might be too hard to understand – so many options, all good, and no direction. You’d be right on the first two but wrong on the latter. The game comes with various decks of cards (professions) that can steer your game plan early on. You get one card at the start of the game (I house ruled every card draw to ‘draw X+1, discard X’ because there are so many cards and a high chance of drawing essentially blanks) that can really help you shape your early turns and decide where you should place your workers.

The game has some many moving parts that interlock in many different ways that it is all but impossible to cover all of them here without you clicking away. A Feast for Odin is a game that is bigger than its already hefty box, yet with an unmistakenly sleek and elegant charm to it.

While all of this might sound daunting, it’s far from it. Sure – you could treat the game as a big optimalization puzzle and overthink your every move, but I find the game at its best when I can just sit down and just see where the game takes me – you know, just ponder my next moves a bit and fiddle a bit with the components before I settle on my moves for this round and how I’m gonna subsequently place tiles on my board (there are some specific placement rules, plus like I said, you can surround certain squares for additional value during your income phase – or just as easily cover them up) for optimal income. It’s just the way you want to play the game, and this is my preference. (Based on my final scores so far, I need to step up my game if I want to secure a place beyond the gates of Valhalla – but sometimes a game is more about the journey than the destination.)

Which brings me to a final point that deserves mentioning – the components. The game comes with two highly functional component trays for all the goods you can acquire. Just put them on the table and you’ll never have doubts about which good upgrades into what. These two components make not only the setup shorter, they also actively enhance your gameplay experience as you have a clear overview of the resources at all times.

What I like

• lots of rules but you’re playing the game in no-time
• a surprisingly relaxing experience
• there’s an abundance of goods so the dreaded feeding phase doesn’t feel as choking as in other Rosenberg titles
• while I usually find the end of beat-your-own-score disappointing, this game is so big that scoring doesn’t feel all that important
• excellent storage solution for the goods

What I didn’t like

• looks can be deceiving: this game looks more daunting than it is, which could turn off players
• even with the storage trays, the setup time is pretty long and tedious

Note: the trays on the right do not come with the game, they are from the Folded Space insert I have for this game.

Expansion

A Feast for Odin has one expansion so far (The Norwegians) with another one underway (The Danes), but as with pretty much every game scheduled for 2020 or 2021, there have been delays and its unsure if its release will be in time for Essen.

Have I played The Norwegians? No.

Do I have any desire to? No – not yet, at least. The base game is more than satisfying enough for me right now.

Is this information helpful to you? Possibly.

Conclusion

A Feast for Odin is my favorite solo Rosenberg game. It combines so many different game elements in a way that encourages you to try things out and explore your options – while you can try to carve some sort of path for you to follow every game, it is much better to try and work with your starting cards and go from there. A Feast for Odin is a game about a banquet that is like a banquet itself – what are you gonna splurge on today? Just remember to save some room for seconds, because you will be coming back for more.

Rating: ★★★★★

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