Champions of Midgard

Worker placement where the workers come back dead.

You are a Viking leader in a harbour town beset by trolls, draugr and things out at sea. Standard worker placement gets you wood, food and warriors; the twist is that warriors are dice, and sending them to fight means rolling them and watching some of them not come home. Glory is the currency, and glory comes from killing monsters rather than from tidy engine building.

The push-and-pull is resource management against risk appetite: you can send a small warband and hope, or spend three turns provisioning a proper one while somebody else takes the monster you wanted. Food is the cruellest constraint — long voyages eat it, and starving warriors die before they arrive. Sixty to ninety minutes and firmly a gamer's game rather than a family one.

Perfect for: anyone who likes worker placement but has always felt it could do with more dying.

2–4 players | 60–90 minutes | Age 10+

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📖 New to the style? What is a Worker Placement game? — what the mechanism is, and why it keeps turning up.