Boardgame review: Fire and Axe

Fire and Axe: A Viking Saga by Asmodée is pretty much exactly what it says on the box, a chance to pretend to be Vikings, marauding across Europe and beyond. Each player gets to be a band of vikings, sailing their longboat to trade with, raid, and settle the rest of the world.


First glance: The components are quite nice. No complaints about the artwork, good sturdy cardboard for the map and tokens, and the plastic playing pieces are bright and easy to distinguish from each other. The plastic city pieces with hidden cardboard numbers underneath work very well; they stand out well against the rest of the board.

So, a quick and incomplete look at the rules: the basic mechanic of a game turn is that you get 7 days worth of actions. If you're at home, days are spent loading vikings and trade goods onto your ship. Once you set out, you can move one space per day, but sailing too many spaces during a single turn will force you to lose either goods or crew. If you are at a foreign port, you can trade a good to the port, raid a city, or settle the land. These actions don't cost any time, but you can only do one thing at a port each turn.

Trading simply means unloading a good from your ship onto the port space, and immediately gaining points depending on how valuable that port space is.

Raiding is an attempt to capture one of the plastic city pieces at that port. The attacker rolls a die; if he rolls higher than the value of the port he captures the city, if he fails a crewman dies. He can keep trying until he runs out of vikings, uses all three dice, or gives up. When capturing a city, the player claims the piece as his own. Each piece has a random, hidden point value underneath it, and the player reveals it and gains that many points.

Settling is like raiding, except that the player has to decide how many dice he is rolling, and rolls them all at once. Each die that fails means one crewman is lost, and then if any dice were high enough he can move one viking from his ship to that port. Settling doesn't earn points right away, but will provide points at the end of the game.

While raiding and settling are usually worth more points than trading, if a viking attacks a port that has received a trade good in a previous turn, he gets a +1 bonus to his die rolls, so selling goods on one turn and then attacking the next turn is a common tactic.

At any given time, there will be three saga cards in play. These are like missions that the home countries are sending you on, and these cards serve as the driving force that directs the game and keeps it moving. Each card has an objective listed, like 'raid Constantinople' or 'trade at York, Lincoln, and Norwich'. Whoever completes the last step of a saga card claims it for itself. Some saga cards, the ones that require you to sail well out of your way, are worth bonus points.  Then a new card is turned up. When all of the cards have been claimed, the game ends.

At the end of the game, players score bonus points for the settlers they have placed, plus bonus points for the player that captured the most cities, and the players that got the most of each of the three categories of saga card. Whoever scored the most points wins.

Overall, the rules are pretty clean and simple. There's a few confusing parts during setup, where it tells you to place trade goods on a part of the map that doesn't exist, but it turns out that doesn't actually affect the game at all. The most confusing rule is the dangerous sailing rule, but carefully reading the examples should straighten things out OK.

Fire and Axe makes a good gateway game, a bridge between experienced gamers and newbies. By and large, the game is structured that if you think like a viking, you'll probably do pretty well. Go out and rampage and pillage. The more you do, the more points you get. While the dice can ruin even the most well-laid plan, there's still room for more skilled players to strategize. In particular, you want to try to figure out how to accomplish as much on a single trip as you can before you have to go home and resupply. There isn't a lot of direct conflict between players, making this more of a scavenger hunt game rather than a wargame, but you can park your boat in a port to block other players out, and there are runecards you can play to mess with each other's plans.

Fire and Axe is probably weakest as a two player game, because of one mechanic in particular. Because it's the person that completes the last step of the saga card that claims it, you need to be careful not to do half the work, then leave the last step wide open for your opponent to jump in and steal. With only two players, this can lead to very short, conservative turns that end up dragging the game, as neither player is willing to risk a partial card until they can do it all at once. It won't stall out completely, because sooner or later someone WILL be able to do a card all at once, but it can still affect the pace. A third player breaks up the symmetry. If two players enter a standoff, the third can just go somewhere else and not worry about slowing down. In any case, the game has a sort of free-for-all feel that's better suited to more players anyway.

Fire and Axe is a game that's probably worth adding to any collection. The bad news is you might not be able to. Unfortunately, the game is out of print, and there are no plans for a reprint. Ragnar Brothers, who made the original game as Viking Fury, are offering the original version again. Unfortunately, this doesn't include the improvements that Asmodée added to the game, like the higher quality components and extra rune cards. If you can find a copy of Fire and Axe, maybe a used or forgotten copy at your local game store, it's well worth snagging.