Nidavellir

3rd February 2022

Thursday night gaming at Simon's came to a conclusion with the 2nd and final game of the evening; Nidavellir.

Google tells me that Nidavellir might mean the wane of the moon and is derived from Norse cosmology.

Protect the dwarf kingdom from the ravages of a dragon by taking on the role of a Elvaland councillor and collecting sets of cards... err... gathering the bravest army of dwarves possible by trawling pubs (I kid you not.).
Where's Sneezy when you need him eh? More like boozy!

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What's in a game?

• Player board: There one of these unusually shaped boards for each player.
  At the top of each board is an circular indentation to slot in an 'Elvaland gem'.
  Down the left side are 3 large 'tavern' illustrations for the Laughing Goblin, Dancing Dragon and Shining Horse taverns which are also respectively marked with 1, 2 or 3 flagons and below them are 2 more circular indentations around an illustration of a money pouch
  Finally, each board has 2 columns of numbers that run down the right side, one in green and the other in purple. The green is labelled with a hunter's horn and the purple with a blacksmith's hammer.
• Tavern sign tiles: These 3 largish tiles each have illustrations identical to the tavern symbols found on player boards.
• Trade gem tiles: There are also 3 of these and they go with the tavern sign tiles.
• Elvaland gem tiles: Unsurprisingly these card tiles are styled after gems, they're also number 1-5 and there's a 'special' gem numbered 6.
  Gems are used to break ties during the game.
• Coins: The coins in Nidavellir are generously sized, circular card tokens and there are a lot of them too! They come in 2 types.
  Starter coins: These bronze coloured coins come in sets of 5 and are numbered on with a 0 and 2-5 (There's no 1!) and the 0 coin also has a special action called coin trade which is explained further below.
  There is 1 set of 5 per player.
  Upgraded coins: These coins are numbered 5-25, they are identically sized to the starter coins. Broadly speaking there are 2 each of the lower half of numbers and 1 each of the higher values.
• Cards: Nidavellir also features a lot of cards that come in a lot of types.
  Dwarf cards: These form the bulk of the game's cards and also the sets that players will collect. Firstly they are classified in 2 categories; Age 1 and Age 2.
  In the top-right corner, they will have a coloured rank symbol that may also a numeric bravery value (A.K.A VPs) and beneath that will be a icon that indicates the dwarf's class. There are 5 classes/colours: Blacksmith, Explorer, Hunter, Miner and Warrior.
  Hero Cards: These are basically less common and better versions of dwarf cards. They typically come with some benefit or bonus for the owning player.
  Royal offering cards: There are only a few of these cards which confer some sort benefit on the owning player, they are also categorised by Age 1 and Age 2.
  Distinction cards: There are 5 distinction cards which can be earned midgame and provide a boost or benefit to the owning player.
  Royal offering cards: There are Age 1 and Age 2 royal offering cards that can be used to upgrade coins - more on this below.
• Card holders: The game comes with 4 little plastic card holders that allow the hero and distinction cards to be displayed in a up right more visible position.
• Royal treasure: This is a fancy name for a cardboard rack that has slots to hold all the upgrade coins. To be fair, it does also serve the purpose of allowing players to see which coins have been taken.

The physical components in Nidavellir are all good. The tokens and tiles are all thick and chunky, I quite like the large sized coins, they feel a bit like poker chips.
The cards holders and especially the royal treasure are a nice touch too. However, since they can only be easily viewed from one side, it sort of forces the game to have a strange setup where the card holders and treasure rack are along one edge of the playing area instead of in the centre with all the players along the other edges. 

Nidavellir also makes good use of artwork, most of which appears on the cards, they contain well detailed, good quality illustrations of different dwarfish characters painted in a sort of monochromatic watercolour style along with a dash of a single colour. Usually I'd find this kind of art a bit dull, but here it works and gives the game a distinctive look.

Much of the iconography is clear but some of the hero cards have symbols which are quite small and may also need looking up occasionally.

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How's it play?
​Setup

• Royal treasure: Put out the royal treasure rack, filling it with all the associated coins that go on it.
• Distinction & hero cards: Put out all the distinction cards on 1 card holder and the hero cards on the remaining 3 holders. spread out so that everyone can see the information on the left edge of the cards.
• Tavern Tiles: Put out the 3 tavern tiles in a vertical line with the goblin tile at the top, dragon tile below it and horse tile at the bottom, matching the order on the player boards.
  Then place a trade gem tile next to each tavern tile.
• Cards: Shuffle all the Age 1 cards into a face-down deck, do the same with the Age 2 cards.
• Players: Give each player a player board and 5 starting coins.
• Elvaland gems: Finally, take the Elvaland gems as determined by player count, shuffle them and deal 1 to each player face-down. Each should then reveal their gem and place it in the indentation at the top of the player board.

On to play
Nidavellir is an auctioning game that has players simultaneously perform series of 3 blind bids during each round. Once bids are revealed, actions are resolved in an order determined by the bids.

• Populate Taverns: Those dwarves certainly need their liquid lunches.
  From the Age 1 deck draw cards and place them face-up next to each of the 3 taverns, keep adding cards until each tavern has a number of cards equal to the number of players.
• Blind bids: In each round all players must make 3 blind bids using 3 of their 5 coins.
  To do so, they must put a coin face-down on each of the 3 tavern spots on their player board, this will be their bid for the cards at the corresponding tavern tile. Thus a coin put on the goblin space is what the player is bidding to take a card from the goblin tavern tile.
  Each player's 2 remaining coins are placed in the indentations around the money pouch.
• Resolve bids: Once all bidding has concluded, all bids are simultaneously revealed.
  Then, starting with the Laughing Goblin tavern, the player who bid the most on that tavern takes the card of their choice, the 2nd highest bidder goes 2nd and so on until all players have taken a card, it means the turn order will change from bid to bid.
  The same is done with the Dancing Dragon and finally the Shining Horse.
  Ties: If 2 or more players bid the same amount, then Elvaland Gems are used to break the tie and the highest value goes first.
  After a tie occurs, the players who tied must swap gems.
  Trade coin: This is 1 of 2 ways to upgrade coins.
  It occurs when the 0 value coin is used in one of the bids, whoever played it must reveal the 2 coins they put in their money pouch.
  The value of the 2 coins is added together, then a coin equalling that value is taken from the royal treasure and replaces the highest valued coin that was placed in the money pouch which, if it's a starter coin, is discarded out of the game. If it was a upgrade coin, it's returned to the royal treasure.
  A player can only ever have 5 coins and unusually for an auctioning game, the players' bids are never discarded.
• Place card: When a player takes a dwarf or hero card, they must be placed into that player's area in a specific manner.
  All cards of the same class/colour must go into a single vertical column on the right side of the player board. Blacksmith and hunter cards should ideally be on the leftmost cards with their rank symbols lined up with the pertinent symbols on their player board.
  Since there are 5 classes/colours, players will end up with 5 columns of cards.
  Other cards: Cards that do not have a class should be put on the left of the player board.
  ​Rows: When a player puts down a card that creates a row of 5 cards - which is row of one of each class/colour, they immediately take a hero card and add it to their playing area. If that card completes 2nd row, then a 2nd hero card can be taken and so on.
  This ability is triggered any time a row is completed.
• Next round: Once all taken cards have been resolved, play progresses to the next round, more cards are drawn from the Age 1 deck and placed next to each tavern.
  Players then flip their coins face-down again and begin blind bidding again.
• Transforming coins: This is the 2nd method to upgrading a coin. Typically this'll be the result of a special ability or royal offering card and will increase the value of a single coin. So a '+4' would turn a '6' into a '10'. Again, a 10 coin taken from the royal treasure would replace the 6.
• Distinction cards: When the Age 1 cards have been depleted... it's the end of an age! The game then goes to allocating distinction cards.
  There are 5 distinction cards, one for each of the game's classes.
  For every class, all players compare the cards that they have each collected. The player with the majority of cards in that class collects its distinction card and whatever benefits it confers.
  This is done for all classes.
• Age 2: The game now continues as before, except dealing the Age 2 cards to the 3 taverns

Endgame
Play continues until the Age 2 cards are also depleted, then the game goes to scoring.
Each of the 5 classes has it's own way to score VPs, suffice to say; the more cards a player has in a class, the more that set scores.
Bonus VPs which can come from various sources should then also be added in.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
Nidavellir does a good job of mixing set collecting with auctioning.
The set collecting element is  about a mixture of getting the cards you want and sometimes collecting a card just to deny it to another player. Sometimes you'll be completing to build sets and sometimes you'll want to take a card no one else does on the cheap. Pretty standard stuff for set collecting and what you'd expect.

The auction mechanics offer something a little different.
​I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of auctioning games, I don't dislike them and I've enjoyed some of them but they're not really my jam. I've often found bidding decisions could be a little stress inducing, which is probably why some people love them so much! Nidavellir cleverly bypasses some of this with it's auction system because players never lose their bids.
Instead of trying to out bid someone or bluff a bid up, players will be trying to gauge how others will bid.

This requires not only watching what cards others have been collecting and trying to anticipate what they will prioritise in each bid but also paying attention to how they've been upgrading their coins. 
If another player has a coin that's got a higher value, it will never be possible to simply outbid them and it might not be even worth going against them and could be a good time to play that 0 coin and get an upgrade instead. There may also be other times when players want to bid low such as when all the cards in a tavern are not valuable or if they're not valuable to other players.

This means that Nidavellir has 3 avenues of strategy that the player must take into account.
Not only do players have to keep an eye on which dwarf cards to try and acquire, they'll want to think about creating rows as well as columns to earn hero cards which cna prove very useful.
Players will also need use that 0 coin to upgrade coins - which is essentially a form of arms race that can't be ignored - unless a player thinks they can win by being last in every auction!

Nidavellir is a solid game and I can't find anything to fault about it. It isn't particularly complicated but there's definitely enough depth here to keep players engaged and generally give them meaningful decisions to make.
If you like auctioning or set collecting games, it's probably worth a look. If you like auctioning and set collecting games, Nidavellir is definitely worth a look.