Podcast #3909

Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Tabletop Tactician. I am your host, and I am thrilled you decided to tune in today. We are going to be diving deep into the icy waters of the North Sea today as we talk about a game that has been generating quite a bit of buzz in the heavy strategy community. We are talking about Karvi. Now, if you are familiar with the board game landscape, specifically the European style of board games, or Eurogames as we call them, you probably know the publisher Hans im Gluck. They are the titans behind classics like Carcassonne, Stone Age, and The Voyages of Marco Polo. When they release a big box game, people pay attention. And Karvi is definitely a big box game.

So, what exactly is Karvi? On the surface, it looks like your quintessential Viking game. You have got longships, you have got helmets, you have got raids, and you have got a map of Northern Europe. But if you walk into this expecting a dice-chucking, ameritrash-style battle game where you are just rolling handfuls of dice to see if you chop someone's head off, you are going to be very surprised. This is a Eurogame through and through. It is a game about logistics, optimization, resource management, and arguably one of the most important resources in the Viking age according to this game, which is beer. Yes, beer play a massive role in the mechanics of this game, but not in a silly way. It is actually part of a very crunchy, very clever action selection system.

Let us start with the theme and the setting. The word Karvi actually refers to a specific type of Viking ship. It was a smaller vessel, versatile, used for both trade and transport, and capable of navigating shallow waters. In the game, you act as a Jarl, a Viking leader, seeking glory. You are trying to immortalize your name in the sagas. How do you do that? Well, you do it by trading goods, raiding foreign lands, establishing outposts, and upgrading your ship. It is a point salad game, meaning almost everything you do generates victory points, or Glory as they are called here, but the puzzle is figuring out which path generates the most Glory with the limited actions you have.

The first thing that hits you when you set up Karvi is the presence of the player boards. These are not just flat pieces of cardboard where you store your wood and stone. These are representations of your ship. And throughout the game, you are going to be literally building out this ship. You will be slotting cards under the board to upgrade your hull, your sails, and your crew. It gives you this wonderful tactile sense of progression. You start with a fairly basic vessel that can't carry much and can't fight very well, and by the end of the game, you hopefully have this tricked-out longship that can sail halfway across the map in a single turn and carry enough provisions to feed an army. That sense of engine building is baked directly into the visual representation of your ship.

Now, let us talk about the core mechanism, because this is where Karvi really shines and sets itself apart from the hundreds of other Viking games out there. The heart of the game is an action selection system that utilizes dice. But do not let the word dice scare you away if you hate randomness. This is input randomness, not output randomness. You roll your dice at the start of the round, and those dice become your workers, essentially. You place them on a rondel track on your personal player board to take actions. The strength of your die might dictate how effective the action is, or how far you can move on your personal track.

Here is the twist, and this is where the beer comes in. In many games, if you roll low, you are just out of luck. In Karvi, you have beer tokens. Beer allows you to modify your dice or, more importantly, allows you to jump over other dice on your action track. It creates this fascinating economy where you are constantly asking yourself, is it worth spending my precious beer to take this specific action now, or should I wait and save it for a bigger turn later? It turns the dice from simple random number generators into a resource that you have to manage. It feels incredibly thematic too. You are essentially bribing your rowers with drink to get them to work harder or row faster. It adds a layer of planning that is incredibly satisfying when you pull off a complex combo.

The game takes place over several rounds, and in each round, you are navigating the main board. The map covers the area around the North Sea, stretching from Scandinavia down to the UK and the coast of mainland Europe. Your ship moves point-to-point along sailing routes. Movement is tight. You have to pay provisions—bread and meat—to keep your crew fed as you travel. If you run out of food, your movement is severely hampered. This brings in a survival element. You cannot just sail endlessly; you need to plan your pit stops. You need to dock at villages to restock, or raid settlements to steal supplies.

Speaking of raiding and trading, this is the main dichotomy of the game. When you land at a location, you often have a choice. You can trade peacefully, exchanging goods like fur and silver for upgrades or resources. Or, you can choose violence. Raiding requires you to have a certain amount of military strength, which you gain by upgrading your crew and your ship's weaponry. Raiding gives you immediate loot and often glory points, but it might close off trading opportunities or require different resources. Balancing these two approaches is key. You can try to be a peaceful merchant prince, or a ruthless warlord, but the most successful players usually find a way to balance both, taking opportunities as they arise.

One of the things I really appreciate about Karvi is the upgrade system. As I mentioned, you slot cards into your ship board. These cards represent equipment and crew. Maybe you hire a navigator who helps you move further for less food. Maybe you get a reinforced hull that allows you to carry more cargo. Or maybe you recruit a berserker who adds to your combat strength. There are so many unique cards in the deck that no two games feel exactly the same. You have to adapt your strategy based on which upgrades become available in the market. If a lot of combat upgrades are coming out, maybe you pivot to a raiding strategy. If you see a lot of cargo hold expansions, maybe you focus on long-distance trading runs.

The production quality, as you would expect from Hans im Glück, is top-notch. The artwork is functional but detailed. It has that classic, slightly dry Eurogame aesthetic, but it fits the theme well. The iconography is heavy, I will warn you about that. There are symbols everywhere. The first time you sit down to play, you might feel a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of icons on the board and the cards. However, once you understand the language of the game, it becomes second nature. The game does a good job of being consistent with its visual language, so once you learn that a red shield means combat strength and a barrel means provisions, you can read the board state pretty quickly.

Let us talk about the weight and complexity for a moment. This is not a gateway game. If you are looking for something to play with family members who only know Monopoly or Catan, Karvi is going to be too much. It is a heavy, thinky experience. A typical game can take two to three hours, especially with four players. There is a lot of downtime potential if you play with people who suffer from analysis paralysis, because on your turn, you have so many options. You have to look at your dice, look at your beer supply, look at the map, check the market for upgrades, and see what your opponents are doing. The decision space is vast.

However, for those of us who love that kind of mental crunch, Karvi is a delight. It rewards long-term planning. You can set up a strategy in round one that pays off huge dividends in the final round. For example, there are tower tracks on the board that represent your standing with different factions or gods. Climbing these tracks gives you passive bonuses and end-game scoring multipliers. Neglecting them can cost you the game, but focusing on them too much might slow down your ship's progress on the map. It is all about opportunity cost. Every action you take is an action you are not taking somewhere else.

The interaction in the game is mostly indirect. You are not attacking each other's ships directly. You are not sinking your opponent's vessel. The conflict comes from blocking. There are only so many spots in the market. There are only so many spaces at a port. If I sail my ship to York and dock there, I might take the bonus that you were eyeing. Or I might buy the upgrade card that you desperately needed for your engine. It is that classic Euro style of passive-aggressive interaction where you smile at your friend while ruining their plans just by placing a wooden meeple in a specific spot.

I also want to touch on the scoring, or the glory points. In Karvi, you get points for almost everything, which keeps the game feeling rewarding. You get points for exploring new tiles. You get points for combat. You get points for having a fully upgraded ship. You get points for hoarding silver. This creates a nice tension because you never feel like you are completely out of the running. Even if your trading strategy fails, you might be able to pivot and scrape together points through exploration. The end-game scoring can also be quite dramatic, as players reveal secret objectives or cash in on those multiplier tracks I mentioned earlier.

Is the game perfect? Well, no game is. As I said, the playtime can run long. The setup and teardown take a while because there are so many components to sort. And the theme, while well-integrated, is still a bit of a veneer over a complex spreadsheet of mechanics. You never truly feel like you are shivering in the cold North Sea; you feel like you are managing a very efficient shipping logistics company that happens to employ Vikings. But for the target audience of heavy Euro gamers, that is exactly what we want.

Comparisons are inevitable. People often compare it to games like A Feast for Odin because of the Viking theme and the heavy strategy. But mechanically, they are quite different. A Feast for Odin is a worker placement and polyomino tile-laying game. Karvi is much more about that dice-rondel mechanism and point-to-point movement. It feels more like a race in some aspects. You are racing to get to the good ports, racing to get the good upgrades. It also has shades of The Voyages of Marco Polo in how it uses dice as resources, which makes sense given the publisher pedigree.

One aspect I haven't mentioned yet is the solo mode. Solo gaming has become huge, and Karvi supports it right out of the box. The solo bot is robust and simulates a second player effectively. It blocks spots, takes cards, and races you on the tracks. It is a great way to learn the game before teaching it to a group, or just to enjoy the puzzle on a quiet evening. The maintenance for the bot is manageable, though it does add a bit of overhead to the turns.

So, who is Karvi for? It is for the gamer who looks at a board covered in tracks, resources, and cards and says, yes, let me organize this chaos. It is for the player who enjoys building an engine and watching it hum. It is for the group that likes high interaction through drafting and blocking, rather than direct combat. If you enjoy games like Great Western Trail, where you are moving along a path and upgrading your personal player board, you will find familiar and pleasing rhythms here.

To summarize the experience of playing Karvi: It starts with a sense of restriction. Your ship is slow, your crew is weak, and you have no beer. You feel the pressure of the open sea. But slowly, turn by turn, you make smart trades. You raid a monastery and get some gold. You hire a better captain. Suddenly, you are zipping across the map. You are rolling your dice and using beer to manipulate them into doing exactly what you want. You feel clever. And that is the hallmark of a great strategy game. It makes you feel smart for solving the puzzle it presents.

If you have a chance to try Karvi, I highly recommend giving it a spin. Just make sure you have a large table, a few hours of free time, and maybe a beverage of your own to stay on theme. It is a design that rewards repeated plays. The first game is just learning the icons. The second game is understanding the flow. By the third game, you are really competing and seeing the depth of the strategies available. It is a game that respects your intelligence and challenges your planning skills.

That is going to wrap up our deep dive into Karvi for this episode. I hope this gave you a good overview of what to expect from this Viking saga of a board game. Whether you are a peaceful trader or a raid-happy warlord, there is a path to glory for you in the North Sea. As always, thank you so much for listening to The Tabletop Tactician. I appreciate you taking the time to let me talk about cardboard and plastic with you. Until next time, keep your dice rolling high, your meeples standing tall, and your ships sailing true. Goodbye for now.