Looot Review

Looot does a lot of things well. It combines two separate geometric puzzles – one shared, one personal – and asks you to figure out the best way to take advantage of the opportunities on each. When I explain the game that way it sounds like it could be tricky, and if you want to score well it is tricky, but it’s hidden behind a game that is so approachable, so friendly, and so easy to learn that it doesn’t feel like it. If you like games like Barenpark, The Guild of Merchant Explorers (read my review here), or even Yokohama, you might just enjoy this one too.

Hiking Vikings

The main board represents an unnamed land where your Viking longships have landed. This is where you take your actions, and taking an action is as simple as placing one of your Viking meeples on an unoccupied hex. The only placement rule is that you have to be adjacent to another Viking (anybody’s!) or one of the longboat spaces. The Vikings spread out across the lands like cracks in ice, gathering the resources from the hex they’re placed in. Gaining resources is the most stressful thing in the game, especially at the start.

“But Adam, you said it’s approachable and friendly. Why is it stressful?”

You got me there, but let me explain. When you take a resource tile you add it to your own board. Your village. Gravity in your village must be particularly strong though, because once you place a tile it’s there for good. You cannot move it. Where you choose to place things really matters though. Throughout the game, you can pick up longship tiles, and you also start with three special building tiles on your board too. To complete and to score these tiles they need to be adjacent to the things printed on them. For instance, you might choose a longship tile which needs to be adjacent to two trees and one sheep. Once it is, you flip the tile and benefit from the bonus, which is usually to give you bonus VPs at the end of the game for having particular tiles on your board.

You might be able to see where this going already now. Given that a hex has six adjacent sides and that you can take a longship tile each turn, there are opportunities for a single resource tile to adjacent to multiple longships or buildings. This is where the soul of Looot lives. The decisions around what you want to place, and where you want to place it. Your first game will consist of decisions like “I don’t know, I might as well just go here”, but it doesn’t take long to start seeing opportunities to chain together multiple bonus tiles and really start leaning into a strategy.

Village pillage

Once you get to grips with the game it might feel like there’s no reason to cross paths with the other players when it comes to adding Vikings to the main board. Sure, there are some opportunities to take a space just because you think someone else really wants that resource, but there are so many duplicate resources on the board that it doesn’t make much sense to do it. Where things get interesting is with the buildings.

Some of the spots on the main board feature one of three building types, with the available tiles in piles on them. Each type has its own criteria for taking one. Houses just need to have one of your pieces adjacent, whereas Watchtowers need to be linked by an unbroken line of your colour, resulting in you taking a watchtower tile from both ends of that line. Finally, you have castles which you can claim if you have a chain of four Vikings and one of them is adjacent to a castle. Claimed buildings do the same thing as other resources – they fulfil requirements on tiles you want to flip on your personal board. You can also get bonuses from longship tiles for them.

This chain formation and attempting to grab buildings before the stock of each is depleted is where all of the game’s interaction comes from, and it can be pretty cutthroat. Luckily, the designers saw fit to add a little mitigation in the form of three shields that each player gets. Once per game, you can flip each to use it, giving you bonuses like double rewards from a space, taking a second turn immediately, and most importantly, being able to to place your piece in the same hex as someone else. This lets you break the lines, if only once, and suddenly that game of Norsemen Tron cycles is broken.

I love the fact that the board is modular and double-sided. Each time you set it up the layout will be different which means no game-breaking strategy to try to memorise.

Final thoughts

I first saw Looot at this year’s UK Games Expo, and while I didn’t get a chance to play it, the tables were always full with a real mix of people, and everyone seemed to be having fun. These are the sort of games that stick in my mind from events and make me want to check them out, and I haven’t been disappointed by Looot. I really enjoy this game.

The mixture of route-building and tile-laying is smooth and easy to grasp, even if there’s that initial bump in the road that almost every player experiences at first – where the heck am I meant to put stuff? Strategy is very much created on the fly and is based on things like the board layout, which buildings you’ve been dealt, and which longships are on the board. These little hors d’ouevres of randomisation keep each playthrough feeling different, while still tasting like the familiar meal you know and love.

It’s a quick game offering a decent amount of strategy and a lot of fun. The scaling board size means it’s a game which feels very similar to play regardless of whether there are two, three, or four of you around the table, something it shares with another Gigamic game I reviewed, Akropolis. Like Akropplis, it’s a game which you’ll have played and packed away again inside an hour, which makes it perfect for conventions, starts of game nights with your local clubs, and most importantly perhaps, with your family.

If you’re not sure if it’s the game for you, you can even try it before you buy. It’s on Board Game Arena right now, although you’ll need someone with a premium account to at least set up a game for you.

Review copy kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

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