Lords of Ragnarok is the "spiritual" sequel to Lords of Hellas by the renowned Awaken Realms and acclaimed designer Adam Kwapinski. Both are successful, popular and truly huge board games, with Ragnarok borrowing game mechanics and large, detailed figures from Hellas.
But according to the developers, it's not just a figure swap, theme and renaming - Ragnarok is set to bring its own new mechanics. Unfortunately, I can't personally compare, as I've only seen Lords of Hellas played a few times by people at various events, but never got around to actually playing it due to its almost intimidating size. So consider the following text as a player's perspective of a newcomer tothe mechanics
But I do have experience with another game by Adam Kwapinski - Nemesis, which is considered in many circles to be one of the best board games crowdfunding has ever produced. And which, when one strips away the glamour of a nice game board and models, struck me as just another generic variation on Alien that doesn't bring much new to the table in terms of gameplay, and for me, therefore doesn't really justify the fame it's getting. Don't get me wrong, Nemesis is a fun game, but I certainly wouldn't nominate it for game of the year. And I feel the same way about Ragnarok.
At its core, Lords of Ragnarok is actually quite a simple game at first glance. Each player (which can be as few as one in solo mode or as many as four in regular play) takes on the role of a hero, occupying villages on the map with which to recruit their armies to fight the opposing soldiers or monsters running around the map.
But each action has a sub-event, triggers a mini-game or a reaction, and players will quickly discover that what sounds simple at first glance, when the game has only five actions, is actually quite complex. And as well as moving and fighting your hero or army, you're also collecting runes and artefacts, sending priests, building temples and monuments to the Norse gods (represented by some really beautiful figures) and trying to meet the win criteria, of which there are several.
Which is a nice mechanic in itself, and prevents the game from reaching some sort of deadlock where players get bogged down and afraid to take risks. This is where the game ends, when the first player completely controls three regions on the map, builds five temples, or kills the arch-nemesis (who is always just Loki in the base game, but like any huge crowdfunded game, Ragnarok has a bunch of expansions).
And if, by chance, none of that happens in time, there's that titular Ragnarok, which is activated after a predetermined event is met. After that, players only have one more round to meet the win prerequisites, otherwise the player who controls the most spaces in the center of the game board simply wins.
This makes the game constantly exciting and you never really know who is in the lead, because realistically all four players can be in the lead, just in a different category, and the win is purely about who will finish first to the goal they set themselves.
The game takes 90+ minutes to finish according to the information on the box, but realistically it's more like 2 to 3 hours. And I'd count on an extra half hour or so to explain the rules to newbies, and maybe a little longer to set up a bunch of components. I mean, it's a big game for an entire game night, which can easily take over 4 hours with preparation and explanation.
The game components are of high quality. The miniatures have beautiful, crisp detail and I can say with a clear conscience that they are among the best you can get on the market. This is also true of the cardboard and chips. In addition, the player board has perforated holes for the chips, which is kind of a small but cool feature. And the overall "techno Vikings" style works quite well, and there's nothing to fault the visual style of the game.
But the game mechanics are nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary. Realistically, Lords of Ragnarok plays and sort of behaves similarly to, say, Cthulhu Wars or CMON's Blood Rage / Rising Sun / Ankh: Gods of Egypt trilogy. You move soldiers around the map, take squares to build more soldiers, throw in a few extras, and do it over and over again until someone wins. Sometimes the game is action packed, other times it's more of a trench warfare "cold war" depending on who your teammates are.
But while the basic mechanics aren't particularly hard to understand or learn, there are a lot of different mini rules and mini mechanics or details, so again, it's not exactly an easy game to learn or explain to your teammates.
After all, it says it all that each player gets three double-sided cards straight away explaining how the basic mechanics of the game work and how the player's turn works. Which, by definition, indicates the complexity of the game and the amount of things players have to keep track of and, preferably, remember so that keeping track doesn't delay the game.
All in all, Lords of Ragnarok is a fun game if you're a fan of the genre. As with perhaps all Awaken Realms titles, it has that proper WOW effect thanks to the bloated contents of the box, and it's up to you whether you want another giant board game at home with a bunch of models that's an afternoon's worth of work on its own and takes a while to get going at all.
If you don't have a problem with that, you'll probably have a good time. Not downright great, just good. That's Ragnarok in a nutshell, minus the pile of miniatures and components - a fine game, but one that won't make your chin drop.
Verdict:
Lords of Ragnarok is a typical "modern giant crowdfunded action figure game" with tons of components for the whole evening. If you enjoy these area control combat games, you'll very likely enjoy Ragnarok too. If you don't enjoy them, you very likely won't enjoy Ragnarok either, because it doesn't bring anything new to the genre in a proper way. You move soldiers and heroes around, taking up spaces on the map to battle other players or hunt monsters... Nothing groundbreaking, but it's fun and the amount of components, figures and their quality still manages to impress.
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