But what aspects do play a role? Firstly, there is the great thirst for exploration of the Nordic people. This can be clearly seen on the main board, which shows the land and sea areas and stretches from Russia to America. There are 12 spaces available for country cards, four of which in the northern countries are already filled with countries at the start of the game, while the others are filled during the course of the game. Although all spaces are gradually filled, there are more country cards than free spaces. As a result, not every country card comes into play in every game, which gives Norsemen a certain amount of variety.

Next to the main board, each player has a personal board where we manage our game pieces and units. Not all of them are available at the start of the game, most must be moved to the top to become available. And finally, there is a Jarl board, which mainly serves to activate the movement of game pieces on our personal boards.

During each round, we can send our law speakers to the countries and we can build villages at these places during the course of the game. The former allows us to perform special actions in the countries, while the latter is interesting for the income phase at the end of each round.

But how do we reach these lands? Norsemen uses the so-called exploration phase, in which each player gradually reveals exploration cards from their personal deck. After each card, they must decide whether to place one of their available longships on this card to make the card's resources available to them for the round and/or to place one of their lawspeakers on the card, which makes it possible to send these pieces to the indicated land on the main board in the subsequent phase.

In principle, this allows you to reveal all your available cards, but you must damage one of your available ships for every two damage symbols on revealed exploration cards, which limits the number of cards you can use in a turn. In addition, you have to decide immediately after revealing the card whether you want to use it or not. Only a few actions allow you to move ships or lawspeakers later on.

Once the exploration phase is done, you can expand and take turns using one of your available actions. The sent lawspeakers can then be activated on the country cards, allowing you to acquire money or victory points, for example. In addition, these actions can often be used to move units on your personal game board and gradually make them available. In addition to the already familiar lawspeakers, ships and villages, there are also fortresses that can be placed on the country cards and thus create better accessibility for the lawspeakers and the mighty Jarls.

However, many of the actions require us to have resources. These are not collected in advance in Norsemen, but are only available to us by sending longships to our exploration cards.

The Jarl action is the far more common method for moving units our personal board and gradually making those units available. However, we have to be quick here, as all players interact on the same Jarl action board and each space can only be occupied once. If, for example, you want to place your Jarl on the longboat action row (which enables you to move longboats on your personal board and finally make them available) after another player has already played his Jarl, the action gets weaker or demand a penalty (e.g. in the form of money).

As the game progresses, more complex actions gradually emerge because more and more units are available and actions often trigger further actions. For example, activating a lawspeaker on a country card could unlock a village, which can then be placed on a country card immediately and generate income in the same round. New exploration cards can also be acquired with the Jarl action, allowing new countries to be reached and other resources to be made available in the following round.

A round ends with an income and scoring phase, after which all played Jarl, longships and lawspeakers are returned to their owners.

Five rounds are played in this way, with a final scoring phase at the end of the game.

Norsemen is quite easy to explain and quickly accessible even for new players. However, you soon realise that you should spend a little more time to optimise your moves if you want to have a chance of winning a game. The sequence of taking your actions alone is often decisive as to whether you can gain an advantage over your opponents or not. With a full complement of players, this leads to somewhat longer games, which means that the stated playing time of 150 minutes can easily be achieved. With 2 or 3 players, however, 60-70 minutes is more the norm, which means you can achieve a great depth of play in a moderate game length.

Even though I still had a prototype as a test version, it felt like a complete game. Norsemen was a great experience and I liked playing it a lot. The game and the components were already very well developed, had good quality and nice graphics. What I particularly liked about the game was the resource management part. Unlike most other games, you don't collect the individual resources in your supply first, but you acquire them anew each round by placing the longships on the exploration cards. This means that a little hand card management is also part of Norsemen, as personal cards can be supplemented and exchanged (albeit only to a limited extent compared to a deckbuilding game).