Review of Beowulf: The Legend

Beowulf: The Legend is a new big-box auction game by Reiner Knizia.

Players: 2-5
Time: 5-30 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Beowulf: The Legend comes with:

• 1 board
• 1 round shield
• 1 Beowulf figure
• 2 red markers
• 5 black markers
• 110 cards
• 36 square fame tokens
• 24 square treasure tokens
• 3 square misfortune tokens
• 36 round alliance tokens
• 12 small wound tiles
• 10 large wound tiles
• 1 double-wound tile
• 1 rulebook

Board: The board for Beowulf is ... peculiar. It's a three-panel board, which means it forms a sort of "L", and then there's a round shield that fits in a gap in the board. I really don't know what the purpose for this was, though there's nothing explicitly wrong with it either. The board is thick, full color, and linen-textured.

The board depicts a series of 36 different episodes which are played through in order during the game. Most of them are auctions, in one of three types. Some of them are "risk"s where you decide whether to push your luck, some are "opportunities" which you can trade something for something else and some just let you "recover" cards. A lot of iconography is used to make this all clear, and though it's intimidating at first, it's quite well done and by the time you've played the game through once you'll probably have a good grasp on even the subtleties.

(Only one iconic element gave players confusion in the game, and that's that scratches and wounds are a bit hard to tell apart if you don't know the secret for how scratches are displayed--whenever you see a scratch on the board, you can see the edges of the token, while the same isn't true for wounds.)

In the background of all of this is beautiful artwork by John Howe, who also did the work for Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings game. To be honest, I scarcely noticed it because I was so intent on the encounter track, but several other players commented on it, and it's indeed nice.

The encounter track, besides listing the 36 actions you take during the game, also portrays the story of Beowulf, from "King Hygelac's Court" and "Sail to Denmark" to "Dragon Battle", "Recover Treasures" and "Death of Beowulf". This is supplemented by a listing of what all these encounters mean on the last page of the rulebook. I had fun reading the rulebook descriptions as we worked our way through the game, and overall the theming of this game as "Beowulf: The Legend" is quite good.

Beowulf Figure: A detailed plastic figure depicting Beowulf.

Wooden Markers: Two red wooden discs simply mark first player and which items are available in auction. Five black wooden discs have golden inlaid numbers in them, running from 1-5. They show the order of auction winners, and look quite nice.

Cards: The majority of the deck is made up of 100 activity cards. Each simply shows one of the five activities of the game (travelling, friendship, wit, courage, or fighting) through one or two simple icons. A sixth, wild, card show Beowulf's helmet. They're all attractive and easy to use, though I wish the words were on the cards too. They're not at all necessary for play, but they would have added to the theming of the game.

The other 10 cards are special cards. Some have three or four activity icons, while others list special powers that they give the holders on a one-time basis. More nice art here, and all generally easy to use.

The cards are all full-color, printed on medium-weight cardstock. They have attractive, iconic backs, but I was a little disappointed that they're not linen-textured, and feel a tiny bit flimsy as a result.

Tokens: The rest of the components consist of tokens. Tons and tons of tokens. They're all printed on sturdy, linen-textured cardboard. You get some square tokens that show money in various denominations and some square tokens that show fame in various denominations and some circular tokens that also show each. (The squares are a face-up bank and the circles are face-down draw piles). Misfortune squares are essentially negative fame. Finally, the wounds come in three values and three sizes.

Generally, these are all nice, but not spectacular. They have bits and pieces of art, and it's obvious what each one does.

Rulebook: An 8-page, full-color, glossy rulebook. It's well-illustrated, full of examples, and also includes the aforementioned"Legend of Beowulf". Overall, it's easy to learn from and good for reference too.

On the whole Beowulf: The Legend is a beautifully produced game. The encounter track is a bit busy, but manages to convey a lot of information. The pieces are all well-constructed and easy to use. Thus the game earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Design

The object of Beowulf: The Legend is to earn the most fame through the careful balance of resources and the skillful bidding of auctions.

Setup: Each player is given 7 starting cards including one Beowulf (wild) card and one Fighting card. The board is set out and Beowulf is placed at the start of the encounter track.

A first player is selected.

Moving Along: In Beowulf you slowly move along a track of 36 different encounters. In doing so you gain cards and treasure, and have the opportunity to use those resources to earn more of the same as well as fame. In addition, you try and avoid scratches and wounds, because if you're too wounded, you might as well join Beowulf in his Tomb.

There are six different types of episodes: opportunities, risks, selections, recoveries, major episodes, and treasure episodes. The rules suggest treasure episodes as being "optional", but I can't imagine any serious gamer ignoring them.

Here's a few more concepts of relevance to the gameplay:

Alliance Tokens. The alliance tokens are face-down markers which value between 1 and 3 gold or between 1 and 3 fame. You sometimes can select one of those instead of a face-up gold of fame token, adding another "press your luck" element to the game.

Scratches. Throughout the game you might get scratches. Whenever you have three scratches, they instantly turn into a wound, which is something to avoid, because if you have three or more wounds at the end of the game, you're going to lose (probably).

Cards. As you'll recall, there are five different types of cards. Each card has either 1 or 2 of the icon for that card type. There's also a wild card type. The various auctions in the game will require you to bid with different types of cards, so at any time you'll be bidding with just 1 or 2 of the 5 card types in your hand. Essentially, you have 6 different types of currency in this game: the 5 card types and treasures.

The Encounters: Each encounter allows different chances to exchange some resource for some other resource. Remember as you read that this game is all about resource management, and constantly trying to have the correct resources for upcoming encounters (since you can look ahead on the board). That idea influences everything else.

Opportunities. These encounters let you trade something for something else. Cards for cards. Cards for treasure. Cards for fame. Cards for alliance tokens. Fame for discarding wounds. Each player gets to decide whether to take the opportunity or not, in order from the first player.

Risks. These allow you to take a "risk" in order to gain cards. Each risk has two of the five activity icons (that's travelling, friendship, wit, courage, or fighting). If you take the risk you flip up two cards, and if you get one or more of the appropriate types or cards (or wild cards) you get to keep those cards; else you get a scratch. Again, everyone makes a choice in order.

Selections. These give you a choice between five items: 2 gold, 2 fame, 1 alliance token, 2 cards, or lose all of your scratches.

Recovery. Here you deal out 2x as many cards as the number of players, face-up, and each player takes two, one at a time, in order.

Major Encounters. Here we come to the heart of the game: the auctions. Everything else is setting you up for this. There are two types of auctions, "simultaneous play", which is a blind bid, and "clockwise bid", which is an open auction which goes around until everyone has dropped out. In each case you are auctioning with one or two card types (e.g., "friendship" or "fighting" and "courage").

The blind bid is simple: everyone puts down a number of cards of the right types, and then they're all revealed and the black status markers are then given out in order of how much was bid.

In the open auction, bidding goes around the table, and each time a player must add at least one card to his bid and must at least equal the previous bid. As players drop out they're given the lowest remaining status marker. The open auctions also allow you to take a "risk". On any turn you may turn over two cards from the deck, and add any that match to your bid. But if you turn over no matches you're out, even if you could have played cards from your hand.

When an auction is complete, everyone turns in everything they bid. Then players use their status marker to purchase the various items that were available from this encounter, starting with the player with the highest status marker (who bid the most) and going down.

Each major encounter has a unique set of items available for purchase. Some are good, some are mediocre, and often some are bad. For example, in the "Grendel's Attack" auction, the five items are: 5 fame; 1 wound & 2 cards; 1 special card; 1 alliance token; and 1 scratch. The two lowest bidders are thus going to end up spending their cards only to take a penalty. The top player probably gets the 5 fame, while the 2nd and 3rd players will probably decide between the special card and the alliance token. (Note that in games with less than 5 players, fewer of the items are available.)

Treasure Encounters. Treasure encounters work the same as clockwise major encounters with a few exceptions. First, you're bidding with gold, which you might have won either as gold tokens or as alliance tokens through previous auctions. Second, only one player wins, and every one else gets back what they bid.

Winning the Game: The game goes through 36 different encounters. In the last two encounters you first bid all your gold, then all your cards in order to game various fame markers (essentially winning more fame for how many unused cards or treasure you had).

Then each player looks at their wounds. If you had 0 wounds you get +5 fame. If you had 3 or more wounds, you lose 5 fame for every wound. (So 3 wounds would be -15 fame, which is probably enough to knock you out of most games.)

The player with the most fame wins.

Relationship to Other Games

Visually, Beowulf: The Legend (2005) looks a lot like another Knizia/Howe/FFG game: Lord of the Rings (2000). Both center on an adventure path, and both involve cards with one or more iconic symbols on them. This similarity is mainly visual. There are issues of resource allocation in common between both games--where you look ahead, see what resources you're going to need, then try and plan for that--but beyond that the games play entirely different, because while Lord of the Rings is a game about cooperation, Beowulf is a game of auctions.

Beowulf has three different types of auctions and six different currencies. There's two types of open turn-based continuous bidding auctions, one where everyone pays and one where the winner pays and there's one closed bid auction where everyone pays. With this much variety Beowulf somewhat reflects Modern Art (1992), with its multiple auction types. And it also somewhat reflects Money! (1999), with its multiple currencies.

The "all pays" method of auctioning is pretty rare. What's used here is closest in style to a non-Knizia game, For Sale (1997), though Knizia approaches similar ideas in Ivanhoe (2000) and Taj Mahal (2000). I've seen other people call this "Poker-style auctioning", because as in Poker anything you put in is lost, but I don't tend to use the term because it confuses people who think that you're bidding with royal flushes or something. Finishing off the topic of auctions, this game also reminds me a bit of Knizia's Ra (1999) because it feels like there is a similar ability to go down different paths to victory by collecting different things.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that there's an important press your luck component to this game, via the risks. Some people seem to take these as entirely random, but that's very much not the case. You're instead balancing a potential risk (a scratch) against a potential reward (cards). Sometimes the risk is higher, as when you're taking the chance of getting knocked out of a major encounter.

The Game Design

On the whole, Beowulf: The Legend is a serious auction game that will probably appeal to those who enjoy other Knizia auction classics. Knizia generally knows how to design auctions games which remain interesting and exciting throughout, despite the repetitive auctioning action, and this one is no exception.

This is at least partially the result of a good strategic basis; with so many different currencies, and an encounter track which reveals which ones will be needed in the future, you can definitely plan ahead to figure out what you'll need in later auctions. As mentioned before, the resource collection & allocation element of the game is both notable and important. This is all made tense by the fact that you're constantly balancing using resources in one auction that you might need in a future auction, and the risk system adds further tension because it allows new possibilities for victory or defeat.

Some players won't like the luck implicit in the whole risk/reward system. I'm sure that'll be obvious to anyone to whom it might not appeal after reading this review. In short, expect to be occasionally crushed or raised up when you didn't expect to be.

However, my only real concern with the game is ultimate replayability. With a set encounter track there's potential for the game getting stale, but I can't say that if that's the case now.

On the whole Beowulf: The Legend is a fun new Knizian auction game, with all that entails. I give it a high "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

If you're a fan of Knizia's auction games, this is another good entry to the genre. It's got good strategy and interesting risks. Beowulf balances multiple auction types and multiple currencies with the need for careful resource management and overall it all works together well and gives considerable opportunity for good gameplay. Unless you're adverse to a luck-influenced risk/reward system, this one is recommended.