The Viking Horror Dungeon Crawl You’ve Been Waiting For!
Written by Die Rollin' - Oct 25 2023
The Norse lands have been frozen over and the people fled in fear as all sorts of monsters started to appear, it’s been a few years and the Vikings have decided to reclaim their home lands, this is where you come in.
You and your friends will be creating characters from 4 different Viking Classes (Jarl, Raider, Beserker and Huscarl) and venturing into the Frozen Norse lands and across time and space to the ancient forgotten city of Targa (via handy portals you’ll find)
You’ll be facing all sorts of enemies ranging from monsters ripped straight out of Norse Mythology like Trolls and Frost Giants to the ancient robotic denizens of Targa. Each encounter can be deadly so you’ll need to be working as a team to be able to withstand the sanity, physical and corruption damage that your enemies will be bombarding you with.
The game comes with a tutorial mission, 8 “Gates of Valhalla” missions that can be played individually or as part of an interlinked campaign and 5 missions that are adaptations of older missions from previous core sets (you’ll need to download the mission details for free from the flying frog website)
Gameplay is split between dungeon crawling and a Viking camp phase. The main game is the dungeon crawl, which will have you exploring, fighting, looting, completing missions and levelling up. The camp phase is done between missions where you can sell your unwanted loot and Dark Stone (a valuable resource that can corrupt you, giving you various mutations) and buying new equipment, upgrading the camp and upgrading your equipment with the aforementioned dark stone.
You can play this game solo, or with up to 3 other friends, but it’s best playing with at least 2 people as there’s a lot going on in this game, with each monster changing the combat rules due to their own special abilities.
The miniatures look fantastic, they come unpainted, but if you can give them a splash of paint they look amazing on the tabletop. The other components are top notch too with lovely art on all the cards and tiles, lots of tokens and the whole box is dripping with theme.
Your adventures don’t need to stop with this set either, The Shadows of Brimstone expansions are compatible withGates of Valhalla so if you’re sick of fighting the same enemies, why not bring in some Mutated Samurai or Undead Gunslingers? If you want to travel to other worlds, pick up The Derelict Ship to have your Vikings fighting undead horrors in outer space! If you want more variety as a whole for this core game, I’d highly recommend sourcing the Map Tile Pack as it really adds a lot to variety you’ll be getting plus comes with an additional two missions to try out.
I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a hybrid rpg dungeon crawler, with some imagination you can also run this as a full rpg or come up with your own scenarios.