By Ned Jordan

Sometimes it’s good to take a break from screen-based games and gather around a table for a game night. At my house co-op games get the most play – it’s the best way not to find out that a friend doesn’t have a competitive streak that sucks all of the fun out of the night. My latest co-op board game find is Fate: Defenders of Grimheim, a game designed by Jonathon Fryxelius and published by Fryx Games that is designed for one to four players. Fate is a tower-defense game, which means something a little different in the world of board games than in video games. For me, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear “tower defense” is a game that has you placing towers along a path with the hopes that they can do enough damage to the monsters streaming past them that they do not survive to make it to the end of the path. In board games like Fate, though, you’re defending a central tower from assault. The central tower in Fate is actually a village, though, the eponymous Grimheim.

Fate is set in a Nordic fantasy world. The village of Grimheim is home to the Well of Freya, a magical site with an unfortunate penchant for attracting monsters. In Fate, there are three classes of monsters, the Dead, Trollkin, and the Fire Horde. Each of the three factions consists of three levels of monsters: imps, skeletons, and draugr for the Dead, goblins, brutes, and trolls for the Trollkin, and sprites. elementals, and jotunn for the Fire Horde.

Each player selects a hero to defend Grimehim, places the character’s figure in Grimheim, and takes the character’s cards and a player board. There are four types of cards per hero – the hero card, equipment, abilities, and event cards, and these are used to upgrade your hero’s attack and special abilities, as well as provide single use actions. The heroes all start off relatively weak and ill-equipped, and part of the strategy in the game is maximizing the opportunities to upgrade your character without losing sight of the need to stop the advancing horde. The base game comes with four heroes, two ranged and two melee, but additional characters are available as expansion pack purchases.

Rounds consist of each player taking a turn in which they can choose two actions out of the six types of action available, as well as play cards and upgrade equipment and abilities if possible. Once all players have completed their actions, the monsters take their turn by moving in a set direction determined by their starting area and whether or not they are on a road. Enemies adjacent to a hero (or two hexes away in the case of the Fire Horde) then attack.

Rounds are tracked on a time track on the board – there are two of them, one being longer to make for a more challenging game. Some spaces on the track indicated that the monster receive reinforcements. When this occurs, one card is drawn from the monster deck for each player in the game. These cards indicated which monsters to bring into the game and where to place them on the board.

All attacks are resolved by rolling special six-sided dice that indicate different types of hits and misses. The number of dice rolled depends on the hero’s level, weapons, and equipment, so getting these upgraded quickly is important. Monsters roll the same dice, with the number determined by the monster’s level and potentially factional bonuses. Monsters are eliminated once they receive a number of hits equal to their health rating. It is possible to only partially damage a monster, in which case a small die is used to track their damage until they are eliminated. Heroes aren’t killed when their life points are exceeded, but instead are instantly sent back to Grimheim where they are reawakened in a partially injured state.

The primary goal of the players is to keep the monsters from entering Grimheim. The status of the village is indicated by Viking longhouse miniatures and one for Freya’s well. The number of houses is determined by the number of players in the game. Each time a monster enters Grimheim, one of the houses is removed. If a legendary monster enters the village, or an injured player is returned to Grimheim, two houses are removed. Freya’s Well is removed last, and once it is players lose the game.

The monster cards the you draw have a big impact on how difficult the game will be. Two players can work together to stop one or two factions coming from a couple of starting areas, but if those two players are facing monsters coming from six directions the situation can quickly become difficult to manage. I also found it a bit funny that you usually don’t actually save the village, you just reach the end of the turn track – you can win the game with Grimheim completely surrounded and your heroes on their last legs.

I found the game enjoyable – there’s enough randomness in how the monster waves take shape in each game to keep things interesting on subsequent plays, and there are plenty of combinations of equipment and abilities available to the heroes. That being said, the overall strategy in each game is basically the same. Since the monsters can’t advance past a hero-occupied hex, you need to maneuver your heroes to create monster “traffic jams” in which the higher-level monsters get caught towards the back and their march on Grimheim becomes delayed, hopefully to the point at which they will run out of time to push through you into the village.

There are a few other things about the game that you should be aware of. First of all, the game requires a lot of space. The board measures 30” x 22.5” by itself, and you need additional room for the player boards and cards. That large board is good-looking, though, and it’s nice that around the edges you’ll find the kind of game information – monster special attributes, order of play, etc. – that you would usually have to go back and forth with the rule book to find. The art style avoids keeping terrain types entirely within the bounds of the hexes, which makes for more natural terrain, but will lead to some player debate as to whether a particular hex is still part of a forest or is actually a plains hex with some trees spilled over into it.

With so many combinations of abilities and other cards that can come into play, you’ll find that you’ll be facing a lot of effects that fall outside the bounds of the explicit rules of the game, so be ready to spend some time each game negotiating house rules for these situations.

Lastly, in my experience the estimated playing time for the game, 30 minutes per play, is extremely optimistic. Games that I’ve played average over an hour per player, with one two player game that required a lot of compound effect resolution discussions running for over three.

Overall, the game’s gray areas and the way each play still requires the same base strategy do not bring down the overall experience. It’s still a fun combination of hero-building and monster slaying. And if you feel like you’ve got the basics down pat, you can increase the challenge by playing the longer turn track or adding a roll of the game’s monster die once per monster turn. This die injects some randomness into the monsters’ movement, such as rotating around the heroes or pushing them back one space1. For me, while I must turn my game reviewing focus to something new now, I can see myself returning to play this game even when I don’t have to.

Final Rating: ★★★★☆

Note: A review copy of this game was provided by the publisher.