Ragnarok around the clock: Yggdrasil review (iOS Version)

Yggdrasil
Designer: Cédric Lefebvre / Fabrice Rabellino
Published by: Z-Man Games
Players: 1-6
Yggdrasil for iPad on the App Store


Yggdrasil is a cooperative game where players race against time to fend off monsters of Norse mythology and avert Ragnarok. Taking the role of one of a pantheon of gods, each player takes turns raising armies of vikings, forging magical weapons and battling the evil gods. Loki the trickster leads the charge, with great mythical beasts such as Fenrir the wolf and Jormungandr the world serpent joining the fight to destroy the gods and their works. If you hold the line long enough, you all win collectively. Allow too many enemies to advance too far, and you all lose as the cosmos falls to ruin and darkness. Great job.



I'll start by saying that I reviewed this game on iOS. iOS is turning out to be a brilliant resource for boardgamers as there are more and more great games being ported all the time. Even if you don't own an ipad, don't worry as this is a completely faithful translation - you can apply anything gameplay related here to the physical version. I didn't have a copy of the physical game to take photos of (I've included a couple at the bottom sourced from the BGG page for the game just to give you an idea) so mostly I will have screenshots from the digital version - but again the art appears to be a direct copy, so you'll get more or less the same package whichever version you're interested in.

Anyway that aside, let's dive straight into the game itself!

The focal point of the game is the set of tracks that mark your enemies' progression through Asgard. Every turn, a card is drawn from a deck determining which of the 6 enemies advances this turn. After moving up a space on the track, that enemy attacks, meaning bad times for you and your godly team. The further along the track they are, the worse the effects of their attack. The aim of the game is to win combats against these monsters to force them back down the track, but in the long term you're fighting a losing battle. Your limited actions mean you just won't be able to deal with every enemy or win a fight every turn. You're just trying to hold it together against the assault until the enemy deck runs out, and prevent any of the loss conditions from triggering. If at the end of any player's turn 5 enemies are past the first line (the walls of Asgard), 3 are past the second line (the gates of Valhalla) or any single enemy is past the third line (Odin's house), you lose.

The Asgard enemy track. The numbers mark the thresholds for the game loss conditions, beneath that are reminders for combat strength and attack power.

In order to do battle with an enemy, you commit a number of vikings from your personal stockpile then roll a dice, adding the result of 0, 1, 2 or 3 to the number of vikings. If you possess a weapon that provides a bonus against the enemy in question this is also added to your total. After committing your vikings and rolling the die, you get the option to spend from your stockpile of  (much harder to come by) elves to give a final boost to tip the balance. If you equal or beat the combat strength of the enemy, they are defeated and pushed a space back down the track. Fail, and you've thrown away an action and your vikings for nought. The combat strength of enemies climbs as they progress further down the track, making them harder to defeat the longer you wait to engage them. There will be many difficult decisions about which enemies to engage as some have attacks that are far and away more dangerous (Fenrir, Loki for example) and keeping them on the first section of the track is so important you'll inevitably let some of the others slip. But then they in turn become harder to deal with. It's a balancing act and it's done well, if unforgivingly. Failure to accurately assess the relative threats posed by each enemy is going to lead to losing.

Combat as presented in the digital version

The rest of the game board depicts the various worlds of Yggdrasil, the cosmos-tree. Each of the 9 worlds represents an action, and players must take 3 different actions during their turn. As well as their 3 actions, each god gets a special power that gives them additional influence in some area of the game. For example Frey takes an extra action, Thor gets +1 on all combats, Odin allows you to check the next two enemy cards and reorder them. This fairly large selection of actions can be a bit overwhelming at first, but each one is simple enough on its own that there's not too much to remember. Apart from Asgard, the other major world is Midgard. The earthly realm of Midgard allows you to recruit vikings, which is the core engine of your struggle against the forces of darkness and the other major puzzle of the game.

Midgard consists of 4 islands. As an action, you may move the heavenly host of the valkyries one space from their starting position and then recruit vikings from the island they land on. Each island is represented by a bag of tokens (or whatever the invisible digital equivalent of a bag is on the iOS version) containing a number of viking tokens, and also a number of fire giant tokens. You draw out three tokens from the bag, add any vikings drawn to your god's personal stockpile and return any fire giants. The further the island is to the right (and thus the further you need to go to reach it) the more the balance of tokens tips from fire giants to vikings. The leftmost islands contain mostly fire giants at the beginning of the game, whereas the rightmost islands are even/mostly vikings but will take additional turns to reach. Vikings are essential to fighting combats and are in relatively short supply. So drawing vikings good, drawing giants bad.

Midgard - Here I've drawn two giants to one viking, not a great result.

The two other worlds that are most relevant to Midgard and the game in general are the realm of the fire giants and the realm of the dead. Every time the players spend vikings in combat, their souls are packed off to Helheim. As an action you can take up to 5 spent viking tokens and add them to any one of Midgard's islands, making them available for recruitment once more. The realm of the fire giants works nearly the opposite way, allowing you as an action to draw 5 tokens from any island, and remove any fire giants drawn. These giants will sit here safely instead of clogging up your bags and ruining your viking draws. At least until they get cruelly returned to plague you again, but more on that later.

The two other worlds you'll visit a lot are realm of the elves and the dwarven forge. Elves are much like vikings, except you get to apply them after seeing a combat die roll, making them invaluable for maximising your chances of winning combat without over-committing scarce vikings. Each action on the elf realm allows you to recruit a single elf from a fairly limited pool (returning directly here once they are spent in combat). The dwarf realm allows you to buy and upgrade weapons. There is one weapon for each enemy and they can be upgraded from level 1 to 3. As an action you can buy the first tier of a given weapon, or return a weapon and take the next level up. Each weapon adds 1, 2 or 3 points in combats against the enemy it is tied to. When you upgrade a weapon the earlier card is returned to the deck, so if a player upgrades the 1st level Fenrir weapon to 2nd level for example, the level 1 card is available for another player to purchase. Buy weapons early and often, as they functionally replace vikings in combat, you will net more advantage the more often they get used, and you simply won't be able to win a lot of late game combats without a decked out armory.

The final 3 worlds are the realms of the ice giants, darkness, and the vanir. Of these the ice giants will come up the most frequently. Each time Loki advances, his attack deals out one, two or three ice giants into this realm. Ice giants have universal negative effects and must be dealt with in combat to remove them. These effects vary from a combat bonus to a specific enemy, making a particular world inaccessible while that giant lives, to nasty penalties such as denying all gods their special bonuses or removing your ability to roll dice in combat. The former examples are safer to ignore at least for a while, and inaccessible worlds could be somewhere you don't need to go right now. Giant effects like the removal of powers and dice rolls are game-enders if you don't deal with them immediately. But of course, you have to spend resources on combats with ice giants that you might need in Asgard. Decisions decisions. Each ice giant also has one quarter of one of four Runes on it - defeat all 4 giants of the set to complete the rune, and you get a sizeable bonus. But since the giants are dealt randomly and you're mostly trying not to get them onto the board in the first place, this doesn't come up frequently.

 The realm of the vanir is a reinforcements track that lets you spend an action to move up a track of beneficial actions or reset the token to use that action or any below it on the track. While this can be handy, you will so infrequently have spare actions to allocate here that it's not really worth considering as part of the core gameplay. At least until you are much more comfortable with the basic difficulty. And finally there is the realm of darkness, which allows you to spend an action to swap vikings and elves between players, which can come in handy later in the game.

Completing full runes is rare, but the effects are powerful.

So you recruit vikings, build weapons, smash evil faces. Pretty straightforward in theory, but massively complicated by the attacking enemies themselves. Yggdrasil is hard. Rarely do you ever have a clear good option, you'll be choosing from a menu of least-bad catastrophes, which makes for an engaging if nerve wracking experience. Each turn an enemy advances and attacks, and these attacks will in some way undermine your ability to fight back.

Loki as mentioned spawns ice giants with potential consequences all across the battlefield. The number of giants depends on where he has advanced to on the track, and rapidly gets out of hand if he is allowed too far. It is of critical importance to keep Loki back behind the first threshold if at all possible.

Fenrir the great wolf is the next biggest threat, consuming one or more actions as soon as he advances. You will roll the combat die trying to calm his rage, fail to roll a success and you roll again. And again. Until you manage to pacify him. If you have terrible luck, this could potentially eat all three of your actions, and then the next player must still pacify him, while another enemy advances, before moving on to their other actions! As the dice check gets harder the further along he is, Fenrir is the other "must stop" enemy that will spiral out of control if you let him get too far.

Hel the goddess of the dead and Surt, lord of the fire giants are the next pair of enemies, and they mess with your ability to raise armies. Hel will remove vikings from a randomly determined island to the realm of the dead, and Surt will take fire giants and add them to one of your bags. While often not as immediately threatening as the previous two, these guys will steadily clog up your engine and diminish your ability to deal with threats.

Jormungandr and Nidhogg are the final beasts menacing your godly fortress. The world serpent will sink a random island every time he advances, making it temporarily inaccessible for your recruiting valkyries, and returning the valkyries to their home spot. Can be devastating if you've moved all the way to the last island only to get sunk and booted back to the home space, but doesn't get any worse as he advances down the track so he's not quite the threat the others are. Nidhogg varies wildly, as his power is to advance the furthest-back enemy along with him every time he moves. Not good if he's dragging another enemy across a threshold, but if you manage to keep him in last position his attack is essentially negated. Another one who doesn't change up his attack as he moves further on.

Each enemy has a weapon that provides a bonus against them in combat

Whew, that's a lot to take in. So by now you have a fair idea of how the game is played, but you can still expect to lose miserably at first. Yggdrasil is an absolutely unforgiving co-op, as it's a game of small efficiencies. Neaten up the ratio of vikings to giants in your bags, grab weapons to shave vikings off the amount you need to spend in combat, keep enemies just separated enough to avoid triggering loss conditions. In a game like this, early mistakes have a way of compounding over the course of the game into unrecoverable board states. This can be a bit deflating, as even though you may have set yourself up for a loss in the first dozen turns of the game, you're not going to see the result actually play out until the back half of the enemy deck, and it's not exactly a short game. Which makes it difficult to just play again and again to hash out the strategies. If you're likely to lose big your first few games and those games take in excess of an hour each, it might be hard to motivate people to keep playing.

Having reviewed this on iOS I can't comment on the quality of the physical pieces, but the art appears to have been directly translated and it's great. The board looks bright and brilliant and each of the worlds is pretty self explanatory once you know what they are. There's an icon representing each world which to be honest is pretty useless. You're not going to need to refer to them except when an ice giant closes off a given world in which case you'll hunt around a bit to find the icon that matches and place the closed world marker on that spot, not needing to reference it again. But I appreciate the textless design, as language can be a barrier to some.

For instance, the translators of the rulebook. Yeesh. English isn't their first language of course, but a professional publisher ought to be doing better than this with localisation and translation. It's rife with tortured grammar and the iOS client has a bunch of spelling errors. In a game like this which is hard enough when you know what you're doing, further obfuscating the rules is something you just don't need.

Apart from the rules, the mechanical part of the game that doesn't quite sit right with me is the tracking of tokens in the island bags. The bags have set numbers of vikings and giants at the beginning of the game and you are allowed to check/count them whenever, but the game points out that doing so significantly alters the difficulty. For reasons I can't completely articulate, I hate this. Hidden-but-not-really information rubs me the wrong way. I can see the bind here in that given the ratios are set at the beginning of the game, it would simply make good play a tedious memory exercise if you were forbidden to count them. However they seem to acknowledge that it significantly reduces the difficulty when you're always aware of the odds of drawing vikings/giants before you pull and ugh. I can see how this isn't an easily solvable problem and I don't have a fix for it but it just feels messy to basically acknowledge a problem in the mechanics but not really address it. Inelegant design. You could apply a limit and say, count once after one round of player turns or forbid it outright, but this is a patch on the difficulty problem not a resolution of the design problem. It's only more difficult if you don't remember/track the totals. Which isn't fun to do, but is less fun to be penalised for if you don't.

Examples of godly powers

This might seem like a nitpicky point, but something you'll pick up after a few games (and definitely after your first win) is that bag management is the most important part of the game. The risk/reward balance of combat means you should never be fighting a combat you aren't certain to win - you want to commit enough vikings that with your weapon bonus you can push a win with the elves you have available if the dice comes up zilch. The combat with enemies is the win or lose condition but the viking economy is the 'engine' of the game. Losing multiple turns worth of recruited vikings for no effect is a game losing proposition, so solid play doesn't allow this to fall to random chance. This means that the decision making of the Asgard track is centred around target priority and risk assessment, the combat is more or less entirely incidental. Getting sufficient vikings each turn to make this possible then becomes the precondition of playing out the combats optimally. There is definitely a eurogame under all the bright and beautiful theming, and when there's an economic engine at the heart of a game it really needs to be smooth.  When so much of the game turns around the vikings being added to/taken from bags and managing your odds, small imperfections like this have a way of disproportionately impacting your perception of the whole game.

The Vanir reinforcements track. You won't get a lot of free actions to use this in your early games.

While we're on flaws, there's a number of them in the iOS implementation (not the game itself, the interface and accessibility). It's great to include the full rules of the boardgame, however just having unedited scans of the actual physical rulebook - including all the aforementioned textual errors - is incredibly lazy. There's also another layer of rules obscurity when you realise that it refers to the physical components like the viking chits, cloth bags etc that just don't exist in the digital version. This could very easily have been edited and the transition to iOS provided the perfect opportunity to clean up the rules in general. Another area sorely lacking is in the "tutorial". The tutorial more or less copy/pastes the rulebook section for each action telling you what they do they first time you use them. It doesn't actually teach you anything about how to play the game. This isn't much of a complaint for the game in general, as this sort of instruction isn't a constant among physical boardgames anyway. But given the proven potential of iOS to easily provide tutorials and interactive demonstrations like this (see the excellent Agricola, Eclipse, Summoner Wars etc etc) and how hugely beneficial it is for getting players involved in the game, I have no idea why so many games are ignoring it. It's just disappointing, the ipad is such a perfect boardgaming platform and it's plagued with half-assed ports of otherwise great games. If developers want to both make good implementations of their games and drive physical sales, more needs to be done than just translating the gameplay to a touchscreen and calling it a day.

You can see the aesthetic of the digital version is a carbon copy of the real thing

Yggdrasil hasn't gotten a whole lot of press, but it's a worthy co-op game. Closer to Ghost Stories than Pandemic, this isn't a light entry level game and you won't find it a pushover. Even after the initial setup becomes manageable for you, there are additional cards to stack the enemy deck with to increase the difficulty. Angry enemy cards advance an enemy two spaces instead of one when drawn. Ragnarok cards cause 3-6 enemies to each advance a space. The difficulty dial starts at tough and goes all the way up to sadistic, so if you're a fan of the actual gameplay it won't wear out its welcome by being 'solved' any time soon. I find it's a really enjoyable solo experience too and in fact might be preferable that way. It allows you to scale the difficulty even on your own, as you can play the number of gods you want to. Something to be aware of here is that unlike most co-op games, additional players (or additional gods controlled by a solo player) add to the difficulty. The enemies progress at the same rate but your weapons, vikings and elves are split up among more individuals. This affects more than you might think - weapons become really important for winning combats when enemies have crossed into the second and third parts of Asgard, and more gods is more turns before the player with the correct level 3 weapon gets another crack at them. By which time someone else may have advanced or the guy you were waiting to battle went up again and now has extra combat strength to deal with. The more players, the more crucial the world of darkness becomes in swapping resources, which in turn takes up scarce actions. The extra unique god powers offset this a little bit, but you'll probably be surprised how much more complicated the puzzle becomes with more moving parts. If you relish the challenge though it might be right up your alley!

The Ragnarok cards on the top row will advance multiple enemies at once

At the end of the day if you like challenging, thematic co-ops, Yggdrasil absolutely fits the bill. A couple of minor issues (and in the digital version, a few failures of implementation) don't do much to bring down an otherwise excellently put together package. If you're looking for a more easy going collaborative game in the vein of Pandemic then this is going to be too unforgiving. You can probably tell which camp you fall in to just by reading this review, if you're intrigued by a tough nut of a puzzle to crack you won't be disappointed (especially if you are able to play the iOS version for cheap before committing to a physical copy). If you cringed a little to hear of punishing difficulty and inevitable losses, give it a miss.


(Images of the physical version taken from the BoardGameGeek Yggdrasil page )