m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Fjords

I stopped by Your Move Games in Davis Square on my (frequently convoluted) way home last week and couldn’t resist Fjords from Rio Grande Games. It’s a few years old now and I hadn’t heard anything about it, but it has some features I couldn’t resist: hexagons, huts, and tile-laying—the same things that sucked me into Taluva, though on a smaller, 2-player scale here.

The designer of Fjords was the late Franz-Benno Delonge, whose last game was Container. I haven’t played it, but I saw the artwork in Mike Doyle’s blog and thought it was shiny.

Fjords is a two-player game with two stages, usually compared to Carcassonne and Go, respectively. In the first stage the players lay tiles alternately, building up the Nordic landscape, and also set out their four farms (the huts, comparable to farmer meeples in Carcassonne). When the new tiles have been exhausted, land is claimed around the farms by alternately placing the field tiles. The player with the most fields wins.

Since there are only 37 non-start tiles and four huts each, the game is relatively quick and light, even compared to unexpanded Carcassonne. For a longer game, you can get a second Fjords set. (You can double up Taluva as well.)