Expeditions: Viking
Run a village and get into scraps as a fresh-faced Viking noble
sickness, greed, festering wounds and politics are your greatest threats
Gosh, my dad is rubbish. Not my actual dad, mind, who is lovely, but my videogame dad. He’s only gone and got himself killed, leaving me to clean up the awful mess he made of our village while he still lived. That’s how Expeditions: Viking begins—with a dead father, and a son or daughter shouldering a massive burden. It’s more enjoyable than it sounds. The old man died on an adventure in the west, after mismanaging the village for years. So now the place is poor, defenseless, and easy pickings. This leaves you, as the new thegn, attempting the same potentially foolhardy adventure in an effort to save your home.
Expeditions: Viking is both an RPG and a turn-based tactics game, but there’s the hint of a management sim in here too, which places the fate of people and a settlement in your hands. On one side there’s your party, called a hind. You get control over their inventory, must deal with their injuries or other maladies, and give them orders in camp to hunt for food or guard your sleeping warriors. You can control four of them in battle, not including your own character.
Fights are, at least in the first chapter, reasonably fast-paced, and though not difficult, a couple of mistakes can lead to defeat. It doesn’t take much for an ordinary person to go down in battle. An axe to the chest isn’t a minor problem. A broad range of abilities are available and while characters come with their own specialities, they can be developed as you like. There’s also a spot of magic, though it’s historically grounded. Powder that blinds enemies. Battle cries that make them cower in fear. It’s science and psychology masquerading as mystical.
Each member of the hind comes with their own baggage and attitudes, and decisions big and small will determine what they make of your leadership. When I confessed admiration for a man who seemed blessed by Odin, for instance, my more skeptical chums grumbled a bit. Eventually this can lead to friends being lost and new enemies gained, so it pays to get to know your party.
viking for survival
Then there’s the bigger picture. Quests and construction projects can help your people dig themselves out of the mire their last thegn left them in, and the whole impetus of the primary quest is the survival of your clan. But you don’t have to care about that. Maybe you’d rather be a carousing warrior, smashing skulls instead of paying for the construction of farms.
Deciding what leader you want to be and then sticking to it can be tough. I wanted to be good, helping people and being a role model for little Vikings, but it was a struggle. When a group of men in the forest attacked my hind, we eventually realized they were escaped thralls. Slaves. From our village. I was left with three options: let them go, execute them or take them back with us. The first was the obvious good guy option, but what about the village? With so much work to be done, the loss of even a few thralls could threaten the already shaky ground we were on. The pragmatic option could save more lives.
More grounded in reality than your typical RPG, Expeditions: Viking doesn’t shy away from the unpleasant realities of the Viking Age. It’s not a glamorous, fanciful game. It might be better for it, too. Instead of wizards and dragons, it’s sickness, greed, festering wounds and politics that present the greatest threats. By being more recognizable challenges, they are also more tangible.
It remains to be seen how far-reaching the consequences of your decisions will prove after the first chapter, but Expeditions: Viking is off to a good start. Fraser Brown