RAIDERS OF THE NORTH SEA Review: The Right Crew Takes Planning In This Worker-Placement Gem

Review copy provided by Renegade Game Studios

Raiders of the North Sea came out in another lifetime. You could say the same thing of any game released pre-2020, but five years is a long while in boardgame years. So, it’s nice that in 2020, this worker-placement game is still exciting, has been bolstered by expansions, and even can be played digitally through its adaptation from Dire Wolf Digital.

It’s a game that stands the test of (five years’) time and it has been the foundation for Shem Phillips to expand his tabletop empire with the North Sea and West Kingdom Trilogies.

Most recently, it’s been the inspiration for some of the mechanics in the soon-to-be-released Raiders of Scythia. The design has evolved over the years to include new innovative tweaks to the magic formula, but the bones are still there. I’ll be reviewing that game in the near future, but I wanted first to take a step back and examine the original. This is the clever worker-placement game that started this cascade of releases from Shem Phillips.

So let’s gather our crew and discover what makes Raiders of the North Sea worth pillaging for.

STORY

Photo credits: Shem Phillips and Garphill Games

In the central years of the Viking Age, Viking warriors seek to impress the Chieftain by raiding unsuspecting settlements. These warriors must assemble a crew, collect provisions, and journey north to plunder gold, iron, and livestock. There is glory to be found in battle, even at the hands of the Valkyrie. It’s raiding season!

Longboats are useless unless they’re manned by a crew, and the more powerful the crew, the further that the Viking warriors can raid into the mainland.

In Raiders of the North Sea, players are tasked with hiring the right crew for the right raids, capitalizing on the strengths of their townsfolk, and investing their plunder and goods into future ventures deep into the heart of the enemy’s territory.

Harbors, outposts, monasteries, and fortresses—nothing is safe.

What I like about the game’s narrative overlay—which is all it is, to be honest—is that it correctly aims at the Viking crew of raiders. That’s the central focus and what the majority of the gameplay involves. The raiding aspects of the game are over quickly, with the next turn reverting back to the hiring and management of the crew. After all, these are the men and women that you’ll be fighting with! You need to be intimately familiar with them—their strengths and weaknesses.

GAMEPLAY

Man, the gameplay in this is so smooth. Shem Phillips has done a great job creating worker-placement games that are mechanically engaging while also structurally simple.

The main thing about Raiders: players always start and finish their turn with 1 Worker in hand.

You perform one action on the location where you place a meeple and (unless you’re raiding) you perform a second action on the location where you pick up a meeple. It’s simple, but it’s also a small puzzle in determining where you want to go on any given turn. Two open spaces with useful actions? No can do. Once you place one Worker down, you have to pick up from one already on the board. Really need to raid but also have an action in the Village you need to perform? Sorry. Raiding is all you’ll do on a turn, since it replaces Workers with different colored ones and empties a location of Plunder.

And the goal of the game is to accrue Victory Points by raiding increasingly more powerful Settlements, gathering Plunder, and making Offerings in the Village to the Viking chieftain. You can also get VP bonuses from townsfolk sacrificed in raids to the Valkryie and permanent Armor bonuses that increase the further along the track a player progresses.

But again, the main thing you need to remember is placing a Worker and then picking one up. That’s how it goes. The board is divided into the lower Village and the upper Settlements that are vulnerable to raiding.

Players will need to collect Provisions, hire members of their Crew, raid Settlements, and make Offerings. All of the Village locations perform some action to help in that process. The game progresses until only one Fortress location remains, all Offerings have been removed from the draw pile, or there are no Valkyrie tokens left on the board.

Thankfully, the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. Raiders of the North Seas finishes in about sixty to ninety minutes, so players are able to work on their strategy and play it out for a while before the game comes to close. It’s a rewarding mid-weight strategy game that I think is good enough to stay on your shelf for a while.

With more content, it could be even better.

VISUALS

Artwork from The Mico is one of my favorite parts in Raiders of the North Sea. It’s something I love about a lot of the games from Shem Phillips. His partnership with that artist has created some truly memorable illustrations and character art. The hyper-stylized portraits and bold historical outfits draw players into a captivating world.

It speaks to the quality of the visual design when I choose to hire a crewmember in Raiders from love for the look of Viking more than a tactical advantage. Yeah, the Berserker has a useful ability, but he also just looks freaking terrifying in the best way. Doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to because I’ll play it again sometime later and rectify the moment of indulgence.

Like I mentioned in my review of Architects of the West Kingdom, I think that the partnered studios have done a great job of condensing what appears to be a game full of components into a pretty manageable box. I love all of the colorful wooden components (even though the grey meeple doesn’t match the color printed on the board), and the combination of spatial layout on the map and the charismatic townsfolk on the cards lends an air of personality and tabletop panache to Raiders of the North Sea.

I also appreciate how organized the box is. There are baggies for pretty much everything and it doesn’t waste a lot of space. As my shelves grow with new releases and deplete with periodic cullings, I continue to appreciate games that value efficiency in size and inserts.

REPLAYABILITY

This is where Raiders of the North Sea both shines and dims. The gameplay is smooth, the rules are easy, and the mechanics are fun. All of that points to repeated plays with a regular game group. It’s a well-oiled engine with few hiccups along the way—if any—and I think that a lot of gamers who don’t need a heavy-weight strategy game could derive a lot of pleasure from the North Sea trilogy and this box in particular.

Where it loses points is in the simplicity of the mechanics once players are familiar with the structure. With a limited set of townsfolk, eventually, players could find the right combination of townsfolk to hire in the right order to raid a certain set of locations while pursuing the same strategy as always with Armor and Valkyrie. It doesn’t have enough variety to account for groups or partners that play the same game over and over.

If you’re part of a group that plays a game every now and cycles through stuff pretty frequently, then this may not bother you. But for people who like five, ten, fifteen, twenty plays with a game in the space of a year or less, your enthusiasm for Raiders might start to wane.

WHAT IT COULD HAVE DONE BETTER

The base game might not be able to sustain a lot of plays before some gamers get bored. The worker-placement mechanic is fun and it’s always satisfying to perform two actions every turn. But I’m not sure that avid fans of the worker-placement genre or strategy lovers would be able to continually play without some additional content to complicate and elevate the ordinary gameplay.

I haven’t played with the Hall of Heroes and Fields of Fame expansions, but from what I read I suspect that these additions are similar to the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion for Lords of Waterdeep (i.e., an almost necessary addition that increases variability and longevity of play).

Raiders is a great game that will delight many tabletop players, but longevity is what I think would hurt it in the long-run. Without supplemental content, the novel dual-action mechanic and raiding preparation could wear thin and make players lose interest. However, I love my copy of Lords of Waterdeep and have over thirty plays with the expansion included, so I can easily see how the two Raiders expansions could catapult this into a game-night regular.

VERDICT

Raiders of the North Sea provides an immensely satisfying worker-placement experience in a setting where raiding success builds on earlier momentum, careful planning, and resource management. Assembling the right crew takes some skill and a little bit of luck.

It’s an excuse to enjoy the striking artwork of The Mico and the foundational mechanics to many of Shem Phillips’ later games still plays well five years on.

If you like anything else from the veteran game designer, then you’ll likely love Raiders. And if you’re a fan of worker-placement games, then this is a modern classic that still deserves time on the table.

Recently, Renegade Game Studios just released the Collector’s Box for Raiders of the North Sea. And Raiders of Scythia will release on October 23rd. So if you’re a fan of the Raiders trilogy or think you’d enjoy these tabletop games, go ahead and check those out!