Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 2-3 hours

The Components

Fire & Axe comes in a wide box full of beautiful components. They include:

Board: A large six-panel map depicting the ports of Europe. The map is highly stylized, with Eastern European rivers appearing as wide seas, which is a decision that some of the players didn’t like. Nonetheless the board is generally attractive and clearly delineates what you need to know, including four different seas and numerous different regions, each marked by clearly distinctive colors.

Ships & Other Player Pieces Each player gets a large linen-textured cardboard disc representing his Viking ship. It shows spaces for 7 different things to be loaded and depicts the player’s color in the middle. These all feature great art and are a nice centerpiece for each player’s play area.

Each player also gets 16 plastic figures: one longboat and 15 crewmen. These are all molded in soft plastic and have great details. They are--as are all the plastic pieces--quite attractive.

Towns: The 15 towns--3 large, 12 small--which will be placed on the board are also plastic molds. The gray coloring isn’t that interesting, but again the molding is quite nice. Each town has a slot in the bottom which you slide a cardboard disc into that shows the town’s value. They seem to fit snugly, allowing you to flip over a town after you conquer it and see its value. This is another nice component design element.

Other Cardboard Bits: Another 100+ linen-textured cardboard tokens fill out the box. These includes coins in four sizes--1, 3, 10, and 50, which are all very easy to distinguish thanks to differences in color, size, and even shape--as well as a set of trade tokens--which come in three types and are the only slightly dull element among the components.

There are a few other one-off cardboard bits, such as a clever wind marker, which shows which seas are more favorable to sail in, a few last turn markers (which help you track the end of the game), and some markers that help you keep track of what you’ve done in a round. Not all of these pieces were strictly necessary, but their inclusion does make the game easier to play and generally points to the excellent playability implicit in the components.

Cards: 60 cards, all linen-textured, full-color, and quite attractive. The “Saga” cards depict various things that players can do to earn victory points, and are divided into 3 sets of 9. Each card displays the area where the saga can be complete, which makes them easy to use. The “Rune” cards each have some special power, described textually.

Rules: A somewhat intimidating 16-page rulebook that is full of pictures and colorful examples that make the game easy to learn, despite the length.

I should also comment that I was slightly surprised by the price; I expected this to be a $50 game based on the components, not $40 Overall, the components for Fire & Axe are highly beautiful, great quality, and make the game easy to play. Thus they earn a full “5” out of “5” for Style.

The Gameplay

The object of Fire & Axe is to earn the most gold via a variety of different means, including trading, raiding, settling, and completing sagas.

Setup: Each player takes a boat disc, a longboat, and 15 crewmen in a matching color. The longboat is put in the Wintering Box.

The board is set up by placing the 12 small towns and 3 large towns (Paris, Rome, and Constantinople) on the board. These towns are all randomized, so that their value is unknown. The “wind dial” is also set on the board with the “+1” pointing south and the “-1” pointing north, changing the difficulty of sailing in those two seas.

The Saga deck is randomized by first removing three cards from each of the three eras, then stacking the eras--so that era I cards will occur first, then II, then III--then turning up the top three to designate the beginning “quests”.

The Rune deck is shuffled and each player gets one card.

A “skins” good is put on the “Goods in Demand” space.

Order of Play: On his turn a player can take up to seven “actions”, which take a day each (forming a week total). In addition he may undertake “tasks” in towns and undertake certain other activities elsewhere, none of which takes turns.

Actions: Players have three possible actions that take a day: load, draw, or move.

Load. When a player’s boat is in the Wintering Box he can spend a day to load a good or a crewman onto his boat. There are 5 total spaces available for this, plus 1 more appears when the game advances in each of the 2nd or 3rd eras (designated by a Saga card of that era going face-up).

Draw. When a player’s boat is in one of the Home Ports he can draw a Rune card to a max hand osize f 3.

Move. A player can move his boat one space, which can be from one sea space to another, from a port to a sea, or from a sea to a port. Many turns will consist only of movement, and a player may stop short of his maximum movement to avoid losses for sailing in bad weather.

Weather is a constant issue in Fire & Axe. There are four seas, and each sea has a limit as to how many good days of weather you get there each week: 3 in the north sea, 4 in the east, 5 in the west, and 6 in the south. This is modified by a “wind dial” which has four sides that read “+1”, “0”, “0”, and “-1”. It’s aligned so that at all times one sea is at “+1” and one is at “-1”, making them easier or harder to sail.

If you sail in a sea for more than the total safe sailing days, you take losses: 1 crewman or good for each 2 days (or fraction therefore) that you sail over the limit. In addition, you can get hit by this more than once if you move between different seas.

Tasks: Whenever you stop in to visit a port you can undertake a “task”, but just one task per port per turn. The potential tasks are: trade, raid, or settle. Some of these tasks relate to “regions”: this is a group of three color-coded ports which are all near to each other. More than half the ports on the board are grouped into regions, while the others are “neutral”.

Trade. You drop a good down on the port, provided there is no good already there, and there is no good of the same type in the region. (There are 3 types of goods total in the game.) You earn points equal to the value of the port (2-5), +2 if it is the “good in demand”.

Raid. You attack a port with a town on it. You may roll up to 1 die per crewman, up to 3 total, one at a time. If a die exceeds the value of the town, you raid it and take the town piece, earning its value (3-6 for a small town, 8-12 for a big town), else you lose a crewman.

Settle. You try and settle in a port without a settlement, and where there is no town anywhere in the region. You may roll up to 1 die per crewman, up to 3 total, all together. If at least one die exceeds the value of the town, you settle, moving one of your crewman from your boat to the port, but you always lose 1 crewman for each die that rolled the value of the town or less. Settlements will earn points at the end of the game, at least equal to the value of the port.

Other Actions: Here’s the other “free” actions that you can take during your turn:

Move from Wintering to Home Port. This is how you get started. You move your boat from the Wintering Box to one of the three home ports, Denmark, Norway, or Sweden.

Complete a Saga. At any time there are three sagas face-up. Each lists a task to do at one or more ports. For example, “Trade Staraja Ladoga, Rostov, and Bular” or “Raid Dublin and Pembroke” or “Settle York, Lincoln, and Norwich”. If a Viking completes the last of the requirements on a saga (irrespective of who completed the others) he finishes the saga. He takes the card, which will give him the respect of Norway, Sweden, or Denmark (which might earn endgame points), and sometimes earns additional victory points immediately.

Play a Rune. A Rune card can be played at any time, except while in a home port. These cards provide you with various good effects, change the goods in demand, or hurt your opponents. In addition whenever you play a rune card you may turn the wind dial a quarter-turn in either direction.

Move Back to Wintering. This is what you do when you’ve expended your goods and/or crewman. You immediately move your boat back to the Wintering Box, discard all goods and all but one crewman, and end your turn.

If at any time your boat is emptied of crewmen, it’s similarly moved back to the Wintering Box.

Winning the Game: The game is played out over a series of turns with players earning points from trade, raid, or (sometimes) saga, placing figures on the board for settlement, and taking saga cards that he completed and town figures that he raided.

The game ends either when the 18th and final saga card is completed or three turns after the 18th card is flipped face-up, if no one has finished all the sagas by that point. Now a few things earn additional points:

• Whichever player acquired the most town figures (by raiding) earns 3 points per figure.
• Each settlement on the board is worth the port’s value times the number of ports in that same region that were settled.
• For each of the three home ports (Norway, Sweden, and Denmark), the player who completed the most sagas for that home port earns ten points per saga he claimed and the player who completed the second most earns five per.

Relationships to Other Games

Fire & Axe is the new edition of a small-press game called Viking Fury (2004). The components are dramatically better in this new edition, and this new edition also added 9 new, optional, cards that can increase the take-that factor of messing with your opponents. Otherwise they are largely identical.

Generally, Fire & Axe is a unique resource management game. A lot of it looks like a wargame, with crew members that are assaulting ports, but in actuality crew member, goods, and Rune cards are all resources that you’re trying to manage. Granted, their resolution is sometimes random, which sets things a bit apart from the resource-management norm, but nonetheless, the general strategies are similar.

The Game Design

Overall Fire & Axe is a game that has a lot going for it.

It looks somewhat complex, even intimidating, when you first read the rules, but as it turns out decisions are neatly broken down into several different areas, and the “complexity” just points toward a depth of strategy, allowing players to engage in several different paths to victory, including saga completion and massive raiding.

A lot of the gameplay is fairly tactical. You can plan out a strategy, maybe a turn in advance, but beyond that it’s going to depend on what new Sagas are showing up, and what everyone else can do. Fortunately a lot of the tactical play is quite clever, in particular the interactions between movements, the wind, and Rune card play.

The interactions between players are light, but real, as you have to make decisions based on where other people are and what they seem to be doing.

The only downside of the game is in its randomness, which is a bit more than I’d like for a game of this length. However, it’s not entirely overpowering either.

As an “American” style game which centers on aggression, some take-that gameplay, and some degree of randomness, Fire & Axe comes off very well, though it might be of slightly less interest to a serious Eurogame player.

As such I’ve given Fire & Axe a strong “4” out of “5” for Substance.

Conclusion

Fire & Axe is an American-style resource-management game that mixes aggression, luck, and careful tactical play. It’s colorful, it’s beautifully produced, and it’s overall a very good game for the category.

In 3 reviews, average style rating is 5.00 and average substance rating is 4.00.