878 Vikings at the club

We had eight guys out at the club this week. Chen and Brandon played a game of Dropfleet (sorry--no pics) while Taylor and Jonathan played from Dragon Rampant.

Scott, Terry, Bruce and I tried out 878 Vikings with Terry and Scott being the axe-weilding invaders and Bruce and I the brave defenders of the realm.

Bruce and I had a bit of trouble with the dice. For example, at one point I rolled three 1 in 27 rolls in a row. And we had some even worse single results. Tough to defend the realm when you guys evaporate every time they see someone in a horned helmet.

Things weren't too bad. The vikings invaded in the north and, slowly, we whittled them down. They also invaded in the south. We were less successful in pushing them back and started to lose reinforcement points.

About an hour in, we were in trouble but still had enough troops to mount and offensive out of the middle.

Then Terry played a really powerful card (a surprise to me as I hadn't read through the cards ahead of time) and evaporated our guys in the middle of the board. Very frustrating.

At that point we were screwed and the vikings sewed up the win a turn later. Overall, a very interesting game. I like the mechanics of these Academy Games but it plays very differently from the Birth of America series. There are fronts that develop. The sides are asymmetrical in many respects. I'd totally play this again with maybe one of the nine (!) expansions thrown in.