Nidavellir Review

Fafnir is coming and you need an army. Where do you find one? The tavern, of course. In Nidavellir, players are bidding for opportunities to recruit dwarves to their respective armies. Each round, players will secretively bid a coin to each tavern. Then they'll flip their coins and the highest will get first dibs. If there's a tie, the player with the highest gem gets first choice but they'll swap the gems after. Any time you play a zero coin, you get to combine your two coins slotted at the bottom of you board. You add them together and take a coin that matches the value then discard the higher coin. This is how you'll get better ones. Any time you complete a row of each color, you can recruit a hero which can get you points at the end. Each type has different scoring parameters and after the second deck is depleted then players will tally their scores and the highest will win.

The Good: I don't tend to gravitate towards bidding games. They rarely work well at two players and tend to not keep my interest. Nidavellir did a great job at minimizing both of those problems for me. There was less tension than at higher counts but still had enough strategy to try and prevent the other player from taking a card they may want. The coin combining mechanic is fantastic. Doing this often allowed you to almost guarantee you'd have a high coin but sacrificing a bid meant you needed to be careful with where you placed your zero coin. There is also a scoring app that works perfectly. One of the best I've used.

The Okay: This is a weird game to build a strategy for. You can go all in on one color and amass a ton of points or you can play balanced and still score a lot. It really is all based on the cards you get drawn. I thought the artwork was cool using grayscale for the portraits but I do wish that there was more of it in the game. Most of the generic cards recycled art.

The Not So Good: I may not have played the game again without the use of the scoring app. Because they all score differently and scores get well into the hundreds, it can be annoying to manually do it. For purple and green it's on the player board but the others you need to do some math.

Final Thoughts: Nidavellir may have become my favorite bidding game. I'll absolutely play it anytime someone wants to play and there's expansion content if it gets stale. The mechanics and concepts behind it work perfectly in sync with each other and Nidavellir is a game that I highly recommend.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.