Raids

31st August 2021

We're at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club for some Tuesday evening gaming.

The first game of the night was Raids.
Raids is a game about Vikings going around doing what they do, which is raiding and pillaging.
What? You say, that's a cliché and Vikings were also explorers, traders, craftsmen and so on, well this game is called Raids, so raiding and pillaging it is; and all for glory!

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What's in a game?

• Longship boards: These 4 differently coloured player boards each depict a Viking longship as you'd expect. Each Longship has 5 rectangular spaces and each of these spaces contains 2 shields.
  A Longship tile can hold 1 Viking meeple per shield, thus a maximum of 10 Vikings. However, as the game progresses, tiles are added to a Longship and may decrease the number of shields and thus, maximum number of Vikings
  
• Longship tokens: These 4 wooden tokens are coloured to match their corresponding longship boards.
• Viking meeples: Wooden Viking shaped meeples, I guess that makes them veeples, vikiples?

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• Game board: This board shows a number of landmasses surrounding a central sea area.
  Following the coastline is a dotted line that represents the voyages the Viking adventurers (The Players.) will undertake.
  Also along the coastline are a number of rectangular 'encounter' spaces and 3 square 'village' spaces.
  Finally, there's the start/finish harbour space.
• Voyage tiles: These rectangular tiles represent the various events and challenges the players will encounter during their voyages. On their backs they are numbered 1-4 for the 4 voyages that occur during the game.
  There are various different types of tile.
  Improvement tiles: This type of tile includes, Axes which grant a bonus when fighting monsters and Sails and Hammers, which respectively allow you to recruit more ​Vikings and earn Glory (Victory.) points for Vikings at the game end.
  Glory tiles: These come in 2 types. Pennants allow a player to straight up score Glory points and Goods tiles score Glory points if traded.
  Rune tiles: This is a set collection tile that scores at the game end.
  Port tiles: These can be used to sell Goods tiles. They come in single or double size!
  Event tiles: These tiles allow players Visit (Collect a Viking meeple.) or Pillage (Gain money.).
  Monster tiles: These tiles are a menace to all voyaging Vikings, defeating them earns Glory.
• Harbour tiles: These square tiles each have an objective and are used in conjunction with the Harbour space, players can earn money by completing these objectives.
  Usually these objectives are about collecting the most of something.
• Coins: These metal coins come in a denomination of 1, 3 & 6.

The components for Raids are all universally good, the board and tiles are nice and sturdy, the wooden longship and Viking meeples are great components and the metal coins are an nice touch.
Artwork on the game board is nice and colourful and the longship board are also good,  the art on the voyage tiles is a little drab, a little more colour would make them pop but it's only a very minor quibble.
There isn't too much iconography in the game and mostly it's very clear what it means.
All-in-all, excellent, top notch production values for Raids.

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How's it play?
​Setup

• Sort the voyage tiles into 4 stacks according to their number and shuffle them into 4 face-down decks.
  Deal the '1' tiles face-up on to the rectangular spaces on the game board.
  ​Populate the village squares with the relevant number of Viking meeples.
• Put the starting harbour tile on to the harbour space on the board, shuffle the remaining harbour tiles and one face-up next to the remaining stacks of voyage tiles, dealing 3 in total.
• Give each player a longship board.
• Determine a starting order. then distribute Viking meeples to each player according to their position in the turn order.

On to play.
​Raids is played over 4 voyages which each involve journeying around the game board. During these voyages, the players will stop at the randomly placed voyage tiles and deal with those encounters.

• Active player: The active player is whoever is in last place on the current journey and they carry out the following actions.
  Collect: The active player collects the voyage tile for the location they are currently stopped at. Obviously this doesn't count for the first movement since all Longships start in the harbour. More on collecting tiles below.
  Discard: The active player must discard all voyage tiles between themselves and the next player. However, tiles displaying an orange arrow are never removed this way.
  This is clearly to stop a player in last place hopping from encounter to encounter when in last place.
  Movement: The active player must travel onwards, they can travel forward as far as they like and stop at any tile with only one stipulation; they cannot stop at a tile or space with an orange arrow, they can only move past orange arrows, although this may trigger an action. More on this below.
• Combat: If the active player's Longship stops at the same location as another player's, then battle ensues.
  Combat in Raids is essentially an auctioning mechanic.
  Whoever initiated combat must discard 1 Viking meeple.
  The other player may retaliate by discarding 2 Viking meeples.
  Now the initial player may retaliate by discarding 3 Viking meeples.
  This continues until one player chooses to or must flee, in which case they don not discard any Viking meeples and move forward to another encounter of their choice.
  If a player has no Viking meeples, they cannot initiate combat and cannot stop at the same encounter as another player's Longship.
• Collecting tiles: This is never done at the end of a player's movement, but before it on their following turn. It's an important distinction because it allows other players a chance to oust a player before they encounter the tile.
  After collecting a tile, it may go on to the player's Longship board or by the side of it.
  Improvement tiles: These are placed on to one of the spaces on the Longship board.
  Glory tiles: Are also placed on the game board.
  Rune tiles: When Rune tiles are collected, they are put to the side of the Longship board.
  Port tiles: These are also put to the side of the Longship board, furthermore, when collecting a Port tile, the active player may remove 1 or 2 Goods tile from their board and place it next to the Port tile. This means the Goods tile(s) will score at the game end. Additionally, collecting a Port tile gains the active player a Viking meeple.
• Passing tiles: Some voyage tiles and certain spaces on the game board are marked with an orange arrow, players cannot stop at these spaces. Instead they must stop before or after them. Unlike the tiles mentioned above, these tiles are resolved as the active player crosses it.
  Monster tiles: When encountering a monster tile, the active may sacrifice a poor hapless Viking meeple to sail past it or fight the monster. Fighting a monster requires sacrificing the requisite number of poor hapless Vikings to defeat it! However, this means the player can take the Monster tile, place it next to their Longship board and score it at the game end.
  If a player has no Vikings when they pass a Monster tile, then they simply move past it.
  Visit tile: The 1st player to pass a Visit tile acquires 2 Viking meeples, the 2nd player to pass it collects 1. Visit tiles are never collected.
  Pillage tile: The 1st player to pass a Pillage tile acquires 3 money, the 2nd player to pass it collects 1. Pillage tiles are never collected.
• Village spaces: When passing a Village space on the board, each player collects a single Viking meeple.​
• End of voyage: When a player completes a tour of the board and returns to the harbour space, they place their Longship token into the space for their finishing position and the starting order for the next voyage.
  ​Once all players have returned, cash is given out to the player who best meets the objective, then lesser amounts to the 2nd and 3rd best to meet the objective.
• New voyage: Any remaining tiles are removed.
  ​Tiles from the next voyage are placed on the gameboard, Populate the village spaces with more Viking meeples and begin the next voyage.

Endgame
Play continues until all players have completed the 4th voyage, then scores are calculated. Players can earn Glory points from a number of sources.
Pennant tiles on a player's Longship earns straight up Glory points.
Hammer tiles on a Longship earn points per Viking also on the Longship.
Goods tiles that have been traded earn Glory Points.
Sets of Rune tiles collected earn points accordingly.
Monsters defeated earn points.
Finally, cash accumulated during the game earn Glory points on a 1-to-1 basis.
All points are tallied, Highest score wins.

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Overall
Travelling around the map, players will faced with a central choice on deciding how far to move their Longship? Should a player move slowly to encounter more tiles or rush ahead to a tile they really want? This is of course contextual and players will have to identify what they need and prioritise accordingly.
They'll also have to keep an eye out for the behaviour of other players and want to gauge their motivations. The rule where players can only collect tiles at the start of their turn slots into this nicely, possibly allowing other players to fight for the tile and keeping the situation tense. A worker placement game that allows workers to drive off other workers!

I also like how the Longship board works, merging aesthetics and mechanics. It's a great visual representation of what players are carrying and crew limitations.

The game is in essence a mid-to-light worker placement game with a touch of auctioning and resource management mechanics.
Raids fits its Viking theme reasonably well as players sail around, trading and plundering while battling mythic beasts and each other.

Having said that, I found the game a little unengaging, maybe a little too abstract. I could sail pretty much anywhere I wanted with generally minimal risk, it never felt like epic adventuring. Combat was fairly rare, mostly players didn't complete too much for the same resources but it felt bland, a quick glance at other player's Viking meeples will tell you if you can be beat them or not and at what cost. 

I'm also a little uncertain of how much replayability Raids has. Even though it has random placement for the encounter tiles, because they're not really interdependent on each other, it felt like it didn't matter the order in which you might encounter them, especially since I could sail as far as I wanted.

I don't think Raids is a bad game, if someone wanted to play it, I'd have no problem joining in (But not too often!), but it's not a game I'd pick.