24 Jul 2019
You may remember earlier in the year we reported that Dire Wolf Digital were working on a fair few digital boardgame ports, including everything from Mage Knight to Wings of Glory. Raiders of the North Sea by designer Shem Phillips (Garphill Games) was one game mentioned, and we’re very excited to learn that it’ll be landing on our mobile shores as soon as next Tuesday.
There’s an official game page you can check out, as well as some teaser footage:
Raiders of the North Sea is actually the second game in a trilogy themed on the Viking-age, with Raiders representing Scandinavian raiding activities for much of the 8th & 9th Centuries. It’s essentially a worker placement game, with you needing to slowly build up your resources and crew cards so you can tackle bigger and better challenges for victory points; the person with the most being crowned the winner. It’s a four player exercise (an expansion for the physical game did bring it up to five, so maybe we’ll see that at some point), and multiplayer will be both live and asynchronous, as well as featuring cross-platform play between iOS, Android PC and Switch.
It looks like there’ll be plenty to keep you busy outside of the main gamemode as well:
- Turn-Based Strategy lets you play at your own pace!
- Learn the Oars in a full tutorial that teaches you the strategy of the game!
- Explore the North Sea in a 10-game campaign!
- Lead Your People in single-player games against AI opponents!
- Rise to Greatness in multiplayer battles!
Dire Wolf obviously will have the other games mentioned in the original story to contend with, but you can also add another potential project to the list – Architects of the West Kingdom. This is the first entry in a follow-up series of games by the same designer, and in replies to their tweet about Raider’s release date they seem to some-what confirm there may be scope for them to work on Garphill’s latest creation:
Personally, I’d much rather they tackle Explorers of the North Sea, the third game in the North Sea Trilogy, but to be honest Mr. Phillips create such good products that so long as he’s getting love and exposure, I don’t mind what’s being worked on.
We’re working on getting review code as we speak, so hopefully our review will be ready at launch.