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A Feast for Odin
A giant Viking optimization puzzle that hands you too many good options on purpose.
Designed by Uwe Rosenberg · 2016
If you love a sprawling efficiency puzzle with almost no wrong moves, this is one of the best ever made. If you need a tight, mean fight, look elsewhere.
Best for: Solo players and Rosenberg fans who treat optimization as the whole point.
What it is
Here's the pitch. You're running a Viking household, and you spend seven rounds sending your people out to hunt, raid, trade, farm, and explore. Everything you gather comes as polyomino tiles, little Tetris shapes you slot onto your boards to cover up penalty squares. Uwe Rosenberg built it, and it feels like Agricola and Caverna got fed a whole feast and grew enormous. The income track and the feast you owe each round give it a gentle, steady heartbeat.
The catch
Now the honest part. People call it multiplayer solitaire, and they're right. You can play four people and barely touch each other's plans. The board hands you sixty-plus actions, so that lovely worker-placement tension of fighting over one good spot mostly evaporates. There's almost always another fine option. That's freeing for some players and weirdly boring for others. Expect real downtime too, closer to an hour per person than the box's optimistic math, and bring patience for table-mates who freeze up.
Who it's for
So who's this for? Solo players, first and loudest. It might be the best big solo game going, a quiet puzzle you can lose a whole evening to happily. Two or three thoughtful optimizers works great. Four slows to a crawl. If you want a knife fight over scarce actions, this isn't it, and that's fine. But if filling boards with perfectly fitted goods sounds like a good night, you'll adore it.
What other players say
This write-up is grounded in real reviews and player discussion, not just one opinion. A few worth reading:
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