Knarr is a Viking-themed card game from designer Thomas Dupont, with attractive art by Antoine Carrion. The game is published by Bombyx.
In this game, each of the 2-4 players leads their own band of Vikings to expand their reputation and explore and trade with faraway lands in a tight race to 40 points.
The game is easy to set up, teach and play. Mechanically players build two independent engines. One engine consists of recruiting a new Viking member to the crew area and receiving its reward and all rewards from previously recruited Vikings of the same colour. The second engine consists in exploring faraway lands that, when acquired, provide additional rewards to the trade action that can be performed before or after the player’s main action. However, players need to sacrifice their crew of a certain colour.
Each player also collects reputation that provides additional victory points. Timing is very important in this game, and it’s crucial to success: for example, when to use crew members to explore and acquire more victory points.
Tho' Knarr is generally well produced, there are a couple of minor issues with components. These do not detract hugely from the overall experience of playing this game but players may find them annoying. Player cubes need to stack in the reputation tracker, which means they can be easily knocked over. Another minor gripe is that the game includes tokens to determine first player, which is great, but these do not seem to match the wooden component colours that are used to track points and reputation.
Notwithstanding these minor quibbles, I really recommend Knarr: it’s a solid filler-length card game with loads of interesting and crunchy decisions.
(Review by Rui Marques)