Beowulf is the latest big-box hobbyist game from legendary board game designer Reiner Knizia. It's published by Sophisticated Games, Kosmos and Fantasy Flight, the folks who brought us Knizia's classic Lord of the Rings boardgame game back in 2000. It's illustrated by legendary Tolkien artist John Howe. As leading indicators go, you can't do too much better than that.
But it's not always wise to rely on peidgree. So what have they got for us this time?
Each player takes on the role of a companion to Beowulf. The goal of the game is to earn Fame at his side as he whacks Grendel, hunts for and takes down the Sea Hag, performs various and sundry activities of ruling Geatland, and faces off with a Dragon. At the end of the day, the companion who succeeding in accumulating the most fame at Beowulf's side will prevail and succeed him.
For fans of the Knizia classic Lord of the Rings game, Beowulf will feel both familiar in some ways, and yet quite different in others - in much the same way as Lord of the Rings and Beowulf are similar yet also quite different as stories. Like Lord of the Rings (the game), Beowulf (the game) tells the story of Beowulf in an episodic way; players encounter individual episodes from the story in order, and have to profit (or suffer) from them by playing cards that represent Travelling, Fighting, Guile, Valor, and Friendship. But unlike the modern, touchy-feely Lord of the Rings (the story), the ancient Beowulf story is all about personal success at the expense of others in a harsh world: players are in direct competition and commit to, profit from, and/or get hammered by events individually.
In this way, Beowulf, like Lord of the Rings, is fundamentally about risk management – as you might expect from a game about an epic adventure. You don't want to show up at the Sea-Hag's place without a sword, and you have to judge when taking a risk is going to get you ahead, and when to play it safe. Like in Lord of the Rings, you want the right resources available at the right time to succeed; sometimes you will take a risk now to conserve your resources for a later episode that you judge more important, or sometimes you will spend heavily now to avoid an immediate risk. In Lord of the Rings, the tension is over whether you, as a team, will make it to Mount Doom or not. In Beowulf, you're going to make it to the end of the story – you are just in danger of personal failure at the end. Have a nice day.
So how does all this card and risk management play out? You have a hand of cards in 5 suits, each representing the aforementioned personal abilities. The episode track is, in the main, a series of auctions, each in one or two of these suits – so defeating Grendel requires Fighting and Valor, for example. Players bid cards from their hand for the rewards available; it can be either open bidding or hidden, simultaneous bids. Then, in decending order of bids, players choose their rewards – the high bidders get fame, treasure, more cards, or special powers, among other things. Low bidders may get either less of these things, or they may get the always popular flesh wound, or even better a severe blow to the head. These auctions are then interspersed with more fixed opportunities, where everyone can heal, draw more cards, acquire various resources, and so on.
The neat thing that throws a monkey wrench into the auctions are risks. Say that you and the party are gearing up to face Grendel. Your fighting skills are not what they should be, as evidenced by your lack of fight cards. You can either look at Beowulf sorrowfully, saying "Hey, you hired me because I could pilot a ship, not for my skill with the axe!", taking the associated dishonor. Or, you can just wade into the fray despite your lack of skill. This, as you might expect, is risky. Pick two cards from the deck; if they are valid bid cards (i.e., they represent the skills you need), you play them, and may get to stay in the auction. Fail, and you are out of the auction (and so may be lined up for those same penalties you may have been trying to avoid), and take a scratch in the bargain. The scratch is not in and of itself painful. Three scratches, though, and they convert to a wound, and you're out 5 points. Three wounds, and you're looking down an immense end-of-game penalty that will effectively take you out of the game. There are many opportunities to heal scratches, but wounds are much harder to get rid of.
This whole push-your-luck mechanism is what makes the game, and keeps it from being "just another" Knizia auction game, like Modern Art, Ra, Medici, or Amun-Re (just to pick a few of the better ones). Firstly, flipping cards knowing the risks and with the episode on the line is fun. Secondly, it adds a lot of interesting tactical risk management decisions to the game. This is classic Knizia – the whole mechanism of risking seems so simple when you first look at it, and seems like just a little random element he's added to the game, and yet without fanfare it adds a huge amount of depth and interest to the game. Do you risk early in the bidding, knowing you'll need to pick up a few symbols to get the result you want, and so conserve your cards if you fail, but risk getting kicked out of the auction early and scoring 5th place? Or do you try hanging in there by playing cards for as long as possible, thereby limiting the risk you'll come in last, but perhaps spending a lot of cards inefficiently for a middling place? Is it worth it at all to risk now for this auction, or should you just bail? How important is it to get 2 Fame instead of 2 Gold?
To win, you're going to have to do a fair amount of risking. The key is to risk when you can win something good and the downsides are low, and avoid finding yourself in the position of being forced to risk when you can't afford to. Risk early, at non-critical auctions, and you quickly pick up a couple scratches. With two scratches, your options become constrained until you can heal, because a wound will likely costs you points and be hard to get rid of. On the other hand, at the end of the game, when you're facing down the Dragon, you don't want to be forced to risk to pick up the fight cards you need to avoid the brutal double-wound for last place – you want to have the cards in hand, to have done your risking earlier, when the downsides were smaller and could have been mitigated.
If I were to evaluate Beowulf solely as an abstract auction game, it would get very high marks. Like in Ra, you're doing all this bidding with stuff that has no inherent value – 5 different types of cards plus the occasional cash auction. Each auction is very different, with both different things up for auctions and different spreads, with some offering modest upsides for everyone but no downsides, and some having major upsides and major penalties. Additionally you have the risks, which add both uncertainty and excitement, and add to the complexity of the decisions. You're bidding for Fame sometimes, but most of the time you're bidding some resources to pick up other resources, or to take special actions, or to avoid penalties. Almost nothing in the game can be easily or concretely evaluated, so you're making constant judgement calls about what is worth how much, how much extra it's worth spending to get 5 Fame instead of the "negate one failed risk" card, and how far to push your luck. Even in Ra, which I consider a masterpiece, you can sometimes run the numbers to see exactly how many points a set of tiles is worth to various players; in Beowulf, everything is a judgment call. This makes for a great, absorbing game.
But Beowulf goes beyond Ra and other pure auction games by adding strategic planning. You know what's coming up, generally. You know you're going to have to fight the Dragon at some point; this gives you a chance to make trade-offs (should I bid it now or chance a risk and save it for later?) and plan ahead. In this sense it's very similar in feel to Taj Mahal; but while Taj Mahal is a personal favorite, it can be a bit opaque and unforgiving, while Beowulf is much more intuitive.
Beowulf also goes beyond your typical auction game in giving us a really good theme. Sure, maybe auctions don't really reflect how Beowulf's companions were approaching these problems, but as you go down the track, and have to spend appropriate resources for appropriate rewards, and have to take risks to get ahead, the theme really works. While certainly not quite as visceral as the encroaching threats in Lord of the Rings (especially with the expansions), the risks in Beowulf add very effectively to the theme, as they up the stakes and give the auctions a real sense of danger. Sure, it's not the literal theme of classic American boardgames like Republic of Rome or Dune, but by the standards of modern games, it's really exceptionally good. Days of Wonder's recent Shadows over Camelot got a lot of praise for its theme, but to me Beowful is far superior in this department, in having game mechanics that really reflect the feel of the story. In Shadows, the need to put together full houses and straights really cut into the suspension of disbelief. And, of course, the John Howe artwork is fantastic.
Beowulf is Knizia doing what he does best – an auction game, but one with depth, and variety, and fun, and like Lord of the Rings, wedded to a good theme. You're faced with constant, real decisions. There is no downtime to speak of. Player skill is very important, but it has just the right amount of randomness to be fun, to mix things up a bit, and to give the game a real sense of risk. I play a lot of boardgames, and Beowulf is the first one I've played in a long time that I can say with confidence that I'll still be playing in 5 years.
Review Summary