Base price: $20.
2 – 5 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Logged plays: 12
Full disclosure: A review copy of Vaalbara was provided by Hachette Boardgames.
Got sick after Gen Con, so that’s been cool. Just kind of on “bleh” house for a while until I start feeling better. Though, after Day 10, you start to lose a bit of optimism about when that’s going to be. Oh well. I’ll get better eventually. In the meantime, there are many games and many games to write about, so look forward to a few of those getting peppered in over the rest of the Summer / Fall. Very excited about several of them, but they’ll require some warm-up to get a sense of (don’t expect a review of the Arnak expansions anytime soon, for instance). Sky Team, on the other hand; I can probably make that work sooner rather than later. Depends on when I can convince people I’m not going to give them some illness if they come play games with me. In the meantime, let’s talk about a game I’ve already played a few times: Vaalbara!
In Vaalbara, you seek to settle a new and previously undiscovered continent with your clan! Everyone has their own skills and techniques that will help develop your realm and make it the best possible place to live, but there’s only so much available land for the five clans to take over. There’s bound to be a bit of conflict, but rather than fight, you’ve decided to try to do things in a bit more orderly fashion. So that’s something, at least. Use your Characters to claim lands for your realm and try to build a new home for your people!
Contents
Setup
Not a ton of setup for this one! Each player gets a twelve-card Clan Deck:
Then, each player gets two Victory Point tokens to keep face-down. Place the remainder in the center:
Shuffle your Clan Decks and draw five cards to create your starting hands, and then shuffle the Land Cards, removing the cards that don’t correspond to your player count.
Draw and create two rows of X Land Cards, where X is the number of players. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This one’s actually not too complicated from a gameplay standpoint, either. A game of Vaalbara takes place over nine rounds. To start a round, each player chooses a Character Card from their hand. Once everyone’s done that, all Character Cards are revealed! In order from highest to lowest (back of the Land Card deck breaks ties), each player may choose one Land Card from the first row of Land Cards to add to their Realm! Each Character Card has an ability that may or may not activate, depending on the circumstances, like giving you points or stealing points or letting you swap around Land Cards.
After doing that, move the second Land Card row down and reveal a new row. Now that’s the first row and you can start another round! Continue playing until nine rounds have passed, then total scores! Any player with five different types of Land Cards scores an additional 5 points; with six different types of Land Cards scores an additional 10 points. The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
The major player count difference is just that, for a game like this, I’d definitely recommend playing with more people rather than fewer. Vaalbara shines when you’re not completely sure where you’re going to end up in the action selection, so you’re trying to remember what your opponents have played and what they want, lest you get stuck with a card that you have absolutely no interest in. At two, the conflict just isn’t really there. Even with three, the game is a lot more dynamic. It’s also harder to get the specific card you want, but, hey, you’ve got low-value cards you can play if you really want that Mountain. I think Vaalbara succeeds most as a quick high-player count filler game, as a result. It’s snappy, which you kind of need with more players, and it doesn’t take a long time for players to decide what they want. As the player count increases, that goes from “nice to have” to “absolutely necessary” for a 20-minute game, I think. I’ve been enjoying how fast this little one plays, but yes, I would definitely recommend playing it with three or more people.
Strategy
- Try to have some strategy behind every Character you play. Don’t just play a guy to play a guy! You should try to figure out if you can get points for it or if you can use it to rearrange your realm to your advantage. There are no throwaway cards; they’re either useful for priority of taking Land Cards or they have powerful abilities even though they cause you to move slower in the priority order.
- Using the Midwife to get a “good” card back late in the game can be pretty clutch. There are a lot of particularly useful cards, especially based on your strategy, so getting only one use out of them might not be what you’re looking for. Thankfully, there’s a card that lets you bring one card back from your discards to your hand. Keep that card safe for a rainy day, or use it in a round where no card particularly appeals to you? Your choice, but the card you retrieve is equally important.
- You can mess with other players pretty well if you avoid being predictable. You can bait out other players’ low-value cards if you make it seem like there’s a card you really want this round, or you can play a card that lets you swap in a card from the next row that you want. There are plenty of options, but they rely on a bit of subterfuge.
- Successfully predicting what your opponents are going to play can give you a pretty good edge. Similarly, if you know what your opponents want, you can get a mild advantage. You can keep lower-value cards for rounds where you need it more, or you can underbid them and successfully steal something that they need a fair amount. It’s a process. Sometimes, it’s guesswork. But if you can pull it off, it’s great.
- Certain cards let you get rid of cards in your Realm or swap cards in or out of the current round. You can use that to your advantage pretty easily. One particularly impressive trick I saw once from a player was them swapping out a Mountain card after they had played two already. This allowed them to take another one and get another 10 points (since they successfully got another pair again). So that was cool. You can pull off similar tricks to earn certain cards again or gain some extra points.
- Nobody is going to let you get four Mountains. That said, you might be able to get two. Yeah, I can’t really see you getting four Mountains in any game unless you’re extremely lucky or your opponents are super not paying attention. It could happen. It just won’t. You can usually get two!
- Try to at least clear double digits with your Farmer. You really want to try and maximize that Farmer scoring as much as possible. It’s one of the few chances you get to double-score a card, so figuring out when you can most easily get a bunch of points off of the one card is going to be ideal.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Fairly portable little game. It’s on the smaller end both in terms of complexity and in terms of actual size, so that’s nice. It makes for a nice and portable experience.
- I enjoy that there’s some economy around the action selection and what cards you take. There’s a nice balance in terms of cards that let you move first but have “worse” overall effects (giving your opponents points or not getting you that many points) and cards that let you move later but have “better” effects. It’s an interesting balance, and I think Vaalbara strikes a nice chord within that space.
- I really like the art style of the Land Cards and the Character Cards. It’s just a very good-looking game. Big fan on that front. I particularly like the Land Cards; they have a lovely color scheme to them. The characters look nice, as well, though I do wish there were more variation between the clans.
- Having the tiebreaker shift randomly every round is super interesting, especially if you’re trying to figure out how to get a card before a specific other player. It does require you to pay attention, but that’s part of the fun. I like that it opts for a random tiebreaker rather than the standard “last player to have won a tiebreaker wins the next one”. It does mean that occasionally the player in the “lead” gets to win a tiebreaker, but, that’s random for you.
- Plays pretty quickly. It takes a bit of time to get a hang of the flow, but once you’ve got it down, that 20 minute playtime is quite attainable.
- As far as my Board Game Arena plays go, this is a pretty easy game to play asynchronously; it’s easy to get a sense of the game’s state after a quick skim of the play area. It’s a fairly easy game to track asynchronously. The game isn’t a ton of extra work to track between turns, though it’s likely a good idea to have some strategy to it all.
- Some pretty interesting combo potential if you can get the right cards at the right time. Pulling off a cool combo always feels great, pretty much no matter what. There are a lot of options for making one work in Vaalbara, if you can pull it off!
Mehs
- This is a game that really needs more than two players to show its full colors. I’ve tried Vaalbara at two players and it’s … fine. There’s just a lot more interesting things happening with more players trying to duck and dive and outbid each other. I expanded on it a bit more elsewhere, but I’d still say this is more of a 3 – 5 player game, which annoys me a bit.
- The end-game bonuses around having 5 or 6 different Land types are pretty easy to forget. They might be written on a player aid somewhere or something, but it’s the exact kind of thing that players tend to overlook, so be mindful!
Cons
- Studio H has been doing this thing lately where they don’t put the game’s title on all sides of the box, so you really have to display it one way on your shelf if you want the name to be visible. Vaalbara did this, Vivarium did this; it’s mostly just annoying as a Person Who Has Too Many Games and Needs to Store Them All. I’d prefer if they were all visible from all sides. It’s an ongoing process of things that don’t really matter that much but are still frustrating.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I think Vaalbara is a neat little game! It’s been getting a ton of play in my Board Game Arena group because we wanted something that was easy to come back to after a long day of work without having to re-analyze. It’s pretty perfect for that, which is why I like it as a filler game or a game to play between games. The general decision space of the game is pretty small, and you just need to do your best to try and build out a useful and high-scoring combo with the Land Cards you can pick up. The game’s helped by having really nice art on all the Land Cards, as well; they’ve got strong overt colors and great designs. The whole thing looks striking. If I had to complain a bit, my nitpick is that Studio H has done this thing with their recent releases where they don’t put the title on the side that I usually display the game, so I can’t tell what game is on the shelf. I also found the two-player game to be a bit wanting, as I mentioned elsewhere. It’s not bad; Vaalbara just feels like the kind of game where you need three or more players to see the full extent of it. That said, if you’re looking for a quick three-player filler game, you enjoy good art, or you like a bit of action selection, Vaalbara is a pretty fun game! I’ve enjoyed it.
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