Valhalla - A Different Kind of Wargame

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Board Games – Usually the point of a war game is to destroy your opponent, Valhalla turns that around and wants your warriors to fall in glorious combat.

This isn’t a miniatures game, isn’t a pretty pure board game with some large miniatures for certain scenarios. The sculpts are nice and add some atmosphere to the game.

Here’s some info from the manufacturer:

The end is coming and greatest warriors are standing to fight. To die in glory and reach Valhalla.

Valhalla is a card game with dice placement mechanics. Each player takes role of a Jarl who builds a team of warriors and equips them to fight. In battles player roll dice to activate warriors and play special tactic cards. The winning party sends their activated warriors to Valhalla, and whoever has the most points at the end, wins the game.

The game puts a classical "war game" concept on its head. In Valhalla the goal is to win a battle and send winning warriors to Valhalla.

Custom dice add randomness and excitement to the game, and wide variety of Jarls, warriors and battle tactics ensure great replayability.



Blood Rage - 5th Player Expansion

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Board Games – At this point I think I’ve painted all the expansions for Blood Rage and still haven’t painted the core set. This latest project is the 5th player expansion which adds additional components to allow for a fifth player (obviously).

Vikings are always tricky because they’re mostly fur, leather and beards so finding a good mix of browns that work with the player color, in this case green, can be tricky. I achived some additional depth to these brown by using a variety of brown base colors and then applying Contrast paint to bring out the detail. The result is pretty decent.

Blood Rage - Mystics of Midgard

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Board Games – Blood Rage is a viking game. I’ve painted several expansions for the game but not the core game. Much like many other CMON games it has decent quality sculpts for the various characters.

These are really similar to the miniatures from The Others and Zombicide, pretty decent for board game pieces but not quite the detail you get from a mulitpart plastic kit. I painted these up to match the cover art in simple reds, browns and blacks.

As I haven’t had a chance to play this game here’s a description from the manufacturer:

Known by many names (Seiðmenn, Völva, Vísendakona, etc.) and possessed of different powers granted by their connection to the gods, these warrior-shamans will be a boon to any clan able to recruit them!

Mystics are special units (neither Warrior nor Monster) that players can only employ once they've given their clan one of the Mystic Clan Upgrades. Each of these Clan upgrades adds 1 Mystic figure to your clan's reserves, which you can then use to Invade and battle normally. All Mystics have STR 2 and the special ability that allows them to Invade at no Rage cost. Clans are only able to recruit a maximum of 2 Mystics.

Besides adding Mystics to your reserves, each of these Clan Upgrades grants your Mystics a special ability. If you collect several different upgrades, each of your Mystics will posses all the abilities you accumulated, making them incredibly resourceful and strategic additions to your clan!