Looot
- Board's Eye View
- Jul 21
- 3 min read
We're back to the Dark Ages with this Viking-themed game by Charles Chevallier and Laurent Escoffier which was one of this year's nominees for the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres award. In Looot, the 2-4 players are rival Viking Jarls, sending their band of warriors across the land pillaging for loot. The theme is there but this is actually a puzzle optimisation game where players are collecting tiles and positioning them on their individual boards for optimal scoring effect.
On your turn you place out one of your Viking meeples, either adjacent to the 'ships' at the edge of the modular board or adjacent to any Viking meeple that's already been placed. When you place next to another Viking it doesn't have to be your own, so the Vikings spread quickly across the board, with their Jarls each time picking up and positioning on their own board a tile corresponding to the hex their Viking is on. The hexes can show trees, sheep, gold or an axe symbol, but you can additionally pick up house, tower and castle tiles when you meet their adjacency requirements; for example, having a line of connection of your own Vikings between two towers.
Players start off with three randomly assigned scoring tiles on their boards. These show the specific resources and buildings that need to be placed adjacent to them in order to score the tile. In addition players can at the end of any of their turns take and position one of the five longboat tiles on display. These offer additional opportunities to score for adjacent resources but they come with the risk that you'll incur a penalty for any longboat tile you take but fail to satisfy. There is the potential here for this to introduce a push-your-luck dilemma but in most of our plays at Board's Eye View we found players rarely took longboat tiles before they had ready placements for them that already met or almost met their scoring requirements.
Tho' players' focus is mostly on deciding where best to position their loot on their individual boards, there's certainly interaction in the worker placement. Other players may well, for example, use their Viking placement to nab a resource that you were hoping to be able to pick up. Often, an opponent will make it harder for you to pick up the buildings you need in order to score your tiles by, for example, forcing you to take a longer path connecting towers. Players have three 'shields' which give them single use per game special actions. These are the same three actions for each player so you'll want to ensure you make the most profitable use of each of the shield powers. Likewise, players can claim a 'trophy' when they have sufficient axes on their boards. Each player can only claim one trophy and those demanding more axes are, unsurprisingly, worth more points. Timing can be critical here, especially in a four-player game. If you're holding out for the highest value trophy but another player nabs it just ahead of you, you can find you have to settle for a much lower value trophy in its place...
Looot is easy to learn and plays in around 30 minutes. With art by Xavier Gueniffey Durin, it's attractively produced by Gigamic and it's distributed in the UK by Hachette Boardgames. There's also a mini-expansion/promo that introduces an additional shield power and adds longboat tiles that score for axes.
