Please forgive the cult of the new, but I have another Feast for Odin report. Second game, 2 players again.
First off, we narrowly avoided disaster when my girlfriend reached for her phone and knocked over a glass of red wine on a sideboard. It went into the floor and only maybe 2 drops got on a player mat, with the rest of the table being fine. If it had been on the table, it would have almost guaranteed destroyed an $70+ game.
I lost our game yesterday, 8 to 15. I forgot to reroll some hunting tiles, made an awful decision picking up an island, and probably cheated with green tiles at least once (you're penalized 3 points for each pair of green tiles you cheat by putting them adjacent). I felt so dumb when I realize that mistake, too.
8-15 is obviously a horrible score, so today we played again. I still lost, but 56-57. If I hadn't cheated again (why am I so dumb!) with two green tiles, I might have actually won. Heck, if I had remembered to get my 2 silver one round, I would have won. It's like when we play Lords of Waterdeep -- I typically forgot plot quests 3+ times a game and don't get the resources. The neat thing is that our scores grew as we learned, but stayed so close despite our different strategies.
I was a Catapaulter whose stones were doubly effective, so I could do raiding and pillaging with much better odds than normal (you spend stones to help your dice rolls). I was also a Village Leader with a fancy fur coat (once I crafted it), meaning every feast people threw 2 silver at me. She was a Tanner who could turn salt meat into hide for free, and she kept doing that to get a nice crafting chain going. She ended up with tons of food, and bought a food house to store most of it and get extra points. She emigrated her people twice to reduce mouths to feed, giving her a ton of points, yet I had lots of silver and a massive income, balancing it out.
The biggest things that strike me about Feast for Odin are the feelings of gaining skill and the feelings of variety.
Gaining Skill
There are so many variables to consider with the different special tile shapes, the different islands with bonuses, the different houses, the different resources, and the occupations, finding even basic action flows and layout strategies takes some time. It is super satisfying to go from a first game where you fill maybe 2/3 of your home board to a second game where you cover every single negative space. Apparently experienced players start scoring around 100 (a designer mentioned a high score of 150, not sure if that was solo or 2-player), so we still have a lot to improve on from the 50's.
Variety
If you include the two advanced decks, there are 45 different starting occupations, and each player only gets one. Each one changes an action or rule in some fashion, affecting your optimal path. It is easy to get another few additional occupation cards (out of 145), so your chances of getting another rules-affecting card seem decent. So right out of the gate, each game is going to feel a bit different and probably have a slightly different strategy. Adding onto that, there are a bunch of uniquely shaped tiles, and a lot of ways you can drop resources into your grid and pad with silver, and multiple options for feeding vikings, so you have more variability. Adding onto THAT, even if you have some carefully calculated euro strategy, you might be off by one if you gamble on something like hunting, or you might have two basically identical spaces but your opponent takes the cheaper one so you're set back a round (this happened to me tonight).
Obviously it is new and shiny at the moment, and only time will tell how it is received. Are certain spaces too powerful despite extensive testing? Will the integration of dice and cards turn hardcore euro fans off? Will the price and initial intimidation from the action spaces prevent it from getting much play? Who knows.
For me, my gut feel is that it may be one of Rosenberg's finest efforts.
