Fate: Defenders of Grimheim
- Board's Eye View
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Fate: Defenders of Grimheim is an appealing tower defence game from FryxGames, tho' in this game you're defending a humble Viking village rather than a turreted castle or tower. The 1-4 players are working to fend off a seemingly endless onslaught from hordes of monsters homing in on your village from all sides. To collectively win this cooperative game you need to ensure that your village isn't overrun and completely destroyed before the end of the turn track. Naomi Fryxelius' cartoon art may make the monsters look quite cute but don't let that lull you into a false sense of security; you'll be encountering some tough monsters during the course of the game.
Fate automatically scales for the number of players because at the various points on the turn track every player draws a card that adds monsters, so the more players the more monsters there are to fight off. Oh, and the monsters get tougher as the game progresses (you draw from a more dangerous monster deck). The size of the village you're defending also increases with player count; playing solo you'll just have four buildings in the village, rising to 10 in a four-player game. If you want to up the game's level of challenge, however, Jonathan Fryxelius's design has you covered, including the option of a longer timeline to survive and a monster die that makes the monsters less predictable.
Each turn a player gets to take two actions, which more often than not will involve moving and attacking. You fight by rolling custom six-sided dice, and you can expect to be rewarded with gold when you defeat a monster. The gold functions as experience points that your character can trade in at an escalating rate of exchange for upgraded cards and abilities, and you'll certainly need these to stand a chance against the tougher monsters.
Players are represented with minis and individual player boards holding the cards that represent their armour, equipment and special abilities. By contrast, the monsters in the base game all come in the form of cardboard tiles which have all their stats, including the reward for killing them, printed on the tile. The combination may not have the same table presence as a minis-heavy game with hordes of plastic monsters but it makes for easy and accessible gameplay: everything players need to know is there in front of them on their player boards and on the main board, so Fate is a game that's easy to play pretty much straight out of the box without the administrative overhead that often dogs games involving combat with automata-controlled monsters. That said, you can always tempt Fate and add FryxGames' monster box of minis...
