Blood Rage

Somebody dropped a whole box of this off at a sale I was working a couple months back, original shrink cracked but never opened, all the plastic still on the sprues in the KS pledge bags. I ended up buying it myself before it hit the tables, which I’m not supposed to do, but the sculpts on the box art got me and I wanted to see what all the fuss was.

The fuss, it turns out, is mostly earned. You’re drafting cards each round, three ages of it, and every single card in the draft pile is something you’d want, which makes passing physically uncomfortable in a good way. You pick a god to lean into, Loki or Odin or whoever, and build a loose strategy out of whichever cards land in your hand, and you can pivot round to round if the draft doesn’t cooperate. It plays fast for what it looks like on the table, an hour and change once people know their gods.

What I didn’t expect going in is that losing battles on purpose is a real, viable path to points, dying gloriously and going to Valhalla for it rather than winning the fight. That reframes half the decisions in the game once it clicks. I will say the Loki-style cards that reward you for losing seem to have snuck past playtesting a little heavier than intended, and I’ve seen the same complaint elsewhere, that you basically have to hate-draft them out of an opponent’s hands or eat the consequences.

Component-wise it’s the reason this thing sold as hard as it did. The card stock has real snap to it, doesn’t go soft after a session of shuffling the way a lot of 2015-era Kickstarter card stock did, and the monster tokens have honest heft, not hollow-feeling. The board itself has held its shape in the copy I’ve got, no warp along the fold even sitting in a not-climate-controlled garage for who knows how long before it got to me. That’s more than I can say for some things twice its age.