Landnama bills itself as a “non-violent, roguelite survival base builder.” In this, you play various Viking clans settling Iceland in expeditions. To win an expedition, you must successfully colonize six areas. In each colony, you start off with a central hub, that needs to get upgraded 4 times to win. It get upgraded each time you reach a level of heart production, five, fifteen, twenty-five and thirty. To produce hearts, you explore the area, unveiling tiles and building various buildings that either produce hearts or modify those that do. You also need to build houses, which raise the total amount of hearts you can store. The survival aspect comes in the winter toll, which will take away a random amount of hearts. Lose all your hearts, you have one do over. Fail again, colony over. Fail colonizing three times and the expedition ends.

The trick in Landnama is to balance exploration and building with heart generation, so that you always have enough hearts to survive the winter. You also need to build strategically, as certain buildings can only be placed next to other building or certain tile types. In addition, there is a reputation system. Every successful colony gets you reputation, which can be used to unlock new clans, and bonuses. The harder the difficulty of expedition, and of the colonizing itself, the more reputation you will earn. And you’ll need a lot of it since everything is pretty pricey. But it does force you to get good real fast.

I liked Landnama, enough to hand it a Must Play with a nine back-end score. It’s a simple game at its heart, and each game takes only a few minutes. However, it is a game that I found engaging and you’ll want to play again. I’ve reviewed a whole lot of crap lately, and the eShop is flooded with it. It is nice to stumble upon a well-made game like Landnama and I whole-heartily recommend it for those look for a good time-waster. This is not a grand-strategy game, but it stands on its own well enough to be worth it.

Overall: Landnama is a simple but engaging strategy game of Vikings colonizing Iceland that is worth a play to anyone looking a great time-waster.

Verdict: Must Play

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P.S. Try Dolmenjord for good Viking-puzzling action!

Game received for free from the publisher!

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