Blood Rage Review

Blood Rage Review

*Eric M. Lang’s violent, accessible blockbuster.*
Drafting takes precedence over area control in a highly interactive bloodbath for 2-4 players to kill, or get killed for Valhalla. 1-2 hours.

Video published October 25th, 2021

Text Review

Our Scores

Video Review

Highly interactive pillaging over the board.

Overview & How to Play

The world is ending! And we, as the last viking clans of this Nordic world, must get… GLORYY before it all ends! Have Yggarsil run red with the blood of your enemies, or even your own, to go to Valhalla, all while you draft cards in 3 ages!

In Bloiod Rage, everyone is controlling a viking clan- like a bunch of guys dressed up as bears. The goal is GLOORRY!!! (Victory Point by game end!). To get all this Glory, the three main ways are to just win fights, max out your Clan Stats, or complete Quests that ask you to have the most influence in an area.

Every round will have players drafting a hand of 6 cards, then all players using those 6 cards to influence the longer phase of doing actions. In doing one action a turn, players can choose between spawning units, moving them, signing up for Quests, or playing Upgrades. Fighting has players doing a ‘Pillage’ action, and then players will play a combat card from their drafted hand that adds onto their power. Winner gets rewards from the territory, everyone else dies and goes to Valhalla.

After everyone has passed their turn, likely because they run out of Rage (mana) to take any actions, the round ends! Players score points for any Quests they attempted and now succeed in, and then draft cards for the next Age. Oh, and then also a region on the board will get destroyed. After the 3rd and final Era, players also take into account their Clan Stats for end game scoring, which are also bonuses to one’s clan that are advanced to let players do more things.

Pros

Blood Rage just completely does front and center what the box cover and name tells you: it’s ALL about tons of killing in this brutal Nordic world. It’s a relatively fast game, very influenced by each round’s draft, which ends up introducing a fun phase for counterplay, and just spice with all of the card combos. A good draft won’t auto-win you the game by any means, because you still need to play well in the crazy dynamic board! There’s continual adapting as Clans attempt to Pillage, and all sorts of Warriors, Clan Leaders, and mythical Monsters run across regions to fight-fight-fight.

Even during that first introductory game, Blood Rage just has so many things that can make it easily ‘click’. Every single turn is extremely streamlined, there’s the constant conflict of map control versus timing upgrades versus just stalling to control your rage. Combat is streamlined to keep even the central region fights of Yggarsil clean when 3 or 4 players all decide to get in on the violence. Yet to pace your fighting participation, players must keep managing their hands to make sure they have enough combat cards, lest they start being forced to play other cards during combat.

What Blood Rage Really Is

But hey, if you’re looking for some deep deep game, Blood Rage just isn’t it. First off, it’s not really an area control, despite having the Quests that have that idea, because you can often just grab Dominance by sneaking into a corner of the map after Pillage happens. And of course, actively wanting to lose a lot of fights for certain Quests doesn’t help with this Dominance idea. Or one could go for not drafting Quests at all, so you don’t have to worry about your own Dominance.

There’s that constant adaptation and card upgrading… there’s so much of it, that Blood Rage can feel a bit like going with the flow. You just can’t start games with a specific strategy, because you’ll have no idea what your initial draft hands will be, and maybe you just aren’t really cemented on any core idea until 1/3 through Age 2’s draft. This tends to go hand in hand with how point scoring in early Ages just doesn’t really matter as much as the last Age, where the payouts for basically everything start to be 2-3x in comparison.

Streamlining the draft also has some consequences. See, you’re actually not drafting that many cards, you’re only drafting 6 per Age, BUT many of them do VERY cool things, even sometimes by themselves. So there is swingy-ness, where if you can snag one crucial card under the right conditions in your opening hand, you just have a nice advantage like that.

The draft does lean towards this more casual approach for Blood Rage. Even though you want competence to draft away strong combos, wacky drafts off luck-sack hands are possible. But, these don’t break the game because they’re still possible to play around in larger player counts.