Greenland - Phil Eklund's Frigid Frontier

From the Board Game Geek page

The three players in Greenland represent the Norse (red), Tunit (green), and Thule (yellow) tribes inhabiting Greenland from the 11th to the 15th centuries.

As a tribe, you attempt to secure food, resources, and technology to increase the size of your tribe and support children, elders, and livestock while also wiping out competing species or gathering resources to collect victory points. You must work around the weather and the extinction of natural resources as well as negotiate deals to protect your wives while you decide between monotheism or polytheism. In this tableau-building game, you’ll send your population out to hunt native species of Greenland — but some might not come back. (Historically, the climate turned frigid and all but the Thule (Inuit) died out.)

In the game, play takes place over six phases; all players complete each phase in turn order, then the next phase starts. Each turn is one generation. In order:

Resolve events: Examples include elder deaths, animal migrations, feuds, or global cooling. If a trade ship arrives, an auction is held for its wares.
Assign hunters: Hunters are assigned to hunting grounds, resource gathering, colonizing the New World, raiding other tribes for wives or animals, or promotion to an elder.
Negotiate: Players can bribe others to peacefully withdraw hunters, including marrying them to their daughters. Players with a War Chief Elder can use hunters to attack others on the same card. The New World turns hostile if there are too many colonists.
Resolve hunting: Roll a die for each hunter and modify it for technologies and marriages. Success can result in gaining new hunters, resources, hand cards, wives, and/or technologies. Beware, as some animals can be confused by the prey-predator relationship and your hunters might not return. Some successes let your take cards from the central play area into your hand if within hand limit.
Maintain livestock: Pay to keep the animals you’ve already domesticated.
Take elder actions: Examples include invention, domestication, proselytization, and witch-burning. If you have no elders, you can convert to monotheism.
Depending on each player’s ending theistic worldview, he has a variable scoring based on successful hunts (polytheism) or resource gathering (monotheism).

I am a big fan of the way Phil puts so much into his games. The gameplay doesn’t work for everyone but it certainly does for me. His span of subject matter is also wide and varied. This game, which was kinda dropped on the Games podcast on how to teach games, looks to be taking shape nicely and I can’t wait to see it. I’m digging how it looks like the environment drives player actions in addition to the other players. It reminds me of BIOS Megafauna in that regard.

Tom M

This looks so cool! Some of the concepts remind me of things that made Navajo Wars unique.

-Tom

Well it’s out. That’s what Sierra Madre told me when the accepted my order anyway. The living rules have been posted to a google document here:

I missed the boat on Pax Porfiriana so as a gamer interested in Phil Eklund’s projects I wasn’t going to miss it here. I’m still processing the rules and in true Eklund fashion I’m going through a series of, WTF I don’t know what that rule does yet but it sounds awesome. Ultimately I work through them. I still call High Frontier my favorite game and I gleefully wait to pounce with BIOS Megafauna whenever there is a conversation about games on evolution.

Tom Mc

Ooh, thanks for the thread bump and docs link (I think the lack of illustations might make the rules more inscrutable than normal). Do want!

-Tom

There’s a video of Greenland being explained at Gencon. The explanation is actually fairly good. It is still a goofy video filmed in a convention hall so there’s a lot of distractions to wade through. Also Phil Eklund and what I believe is his co designer ended up on an episode of The Long View podcast and while it takes a while to get going there’s eventually, just under an hour in to the two hour podcast, good discussion of Greenland and how the historical background framed some interesting decisions in the game.

Long View podcast:

Gencon Video:

It’s not too long, ten minutes maybe. Worth a view even with all the con distractions going on. Try to ignore the guys setting up behind the two people talking about Greenland even though the camera operator didn’t ;)

Tom M

Wow, this looks really interesting. I’m going to have to find a copy.

So that’s a basic layout of the "board"made up of cards to hunt or otherwise develop. I almost understand the iconography. It’s nice to have more context for those rules.

Tom M

The two Phil’s mentioned on the BGG live stream at Essen that Greenland may even sell out in the next couple of days so if you’re sitting on the fence about this, you may want to order ASAP.

Got home to find this little package in my mailbox. I am now celebrating the arrival of a Greenland here in good ol California. Seeing all the German postal stickers was cute. I didn’t get Pax and I know that’s a larger game in terms of card count but I can’t get over how dense this thing is. This box is about four by four inches square and it packs all the majesty of an Eklund design. I can’t wait to get this on the table.

It’s got Eklund rules so they’re hard to break into, although this seems to be considered his most accessible manual. I’m having a Race for the Galaxy like breakthrough, the iconography of the cards is starting to really click. Now all I have to do is try to convince the people I play with that a game about Greenland is fun. Hey it’s got Vikings, Sabine Raids and flesh eating ponies, that’s a start right?

Tom M

It looks like this has arrived at some US retailers, Funagain in Oregon for instance. You don’t have to go to Germany to get to Greenland anymore. I still haven’t been able to play. I’m more excited about the social tension than trying out the solo mode. You can’t just spring an Eklund game on just any player though, granted this seems to be the most accessible there are still Eklund rules to muddle through.

I still haven’t played and don’t even have Pax, something I kick myself for. I’d be interested to hear about comparisons. I don’t expect them to be too similar, Phil has a crazy amount of attention to detail and the games are centuries and thousands of miles apart. I’ll be looking forward to Pax Renaissance.

Tom M

I haven’t played it yet myself (unfortunately, I don’t have my voice back to teach a boardgame…), but I’m really eager to. It’s the single thing I’m most eager to get to the table at this point. And like many boardgames, the solitaire mode is really just a puzzle mode. It doesn’t even tap into some of the game’s coolest systems.

It’s surprisingly different from Pax Porfiriana. The dice, for starters, add a lot of uncertainty that simply doesn’t exist in Pax. One of the things I love about Pax is how everything – everything! – is known to everyone in advance. You see what cards come out and who buys them. You watch the events march down the line of buyable cards. You see a depression looming. You know which armies can invoke which regimes. It is always clear which army will trounce which other army.

But Greenland, being about the vagaries of survival, embraces the brutality of dice. You can mitigate that with tools and special abilities, but it’s a factor that simply doesn’t exist in Pax. And I get the sense that every game has an arc of inevitable decline. It seems like a balancing act between improving your standing as a culture with technology, domesticated animals, and intermarriage vs. dealing with the worsening climate, dying elders, and shortages of resources.

One thing that does remind me of Pax Porfiriana is the way the victory determination can have sudden late-game shifts with the different scoring for polytheism and monotheism. Pax’s winner tends to come from some crazy slam-dunk convergence of factors that sometimes seem like it never even mattered who was winning all along. I kind of like that in a game and it’s part of both Pax and Greenland.

But, yeah, having not been able to play it yet, I really really like Greenland.

Wait, is Pax Renaissance really a thing?

-Tom

As near as I can tell it is. It seems like it’s Matt Eklund’s project and I see references to prototypes that have been floating around. No idea how close they are to actual production. But it’s something I’m going to be excited about.

Tom M

When reading about Greenland, and I think it’s referenced in the rules themselves, I hear about Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. I liked what I’ve seen of Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse seems very interesting as well.

Tom M

Collapse isn’t nearly as interesting a book as Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it’s readable, and he discusses some situations that aren’t well known by most people. He does go on at some length about the Norwegian settlers in Greenland, and just reading summaries of the game Greenland evokes some of that, though not (say) how the Norse steadfastly refused to learn from the natives, and used destructive techniques like building houses out of sod, using up valuable topsoil.

I’ve never played an Eklund game but researching this is making me think I really missed out on Pax Porfiriana.

I agree with Gus, Collapse is a fun book but I’d recommend The World Until Yesterday (and of course Guns, Germs, and Steel) over it. I tried to make a board game where players are the Norwegians in Greenland after reading Collapse (a lot of that book is written in ways that suggest systematizing mechanics). It turned out horribly, and was essentially just a Puerto Rico reskin with starvation. But there’s clearly a lot for games to explore in there and not terribly many games about fighting off collapse.

So im listening to the Collapse audiobook, it’s something I can do at work. I’m missing a lot I know, the physical book is the way to go and I’ll probably be reading that so I can better absorb the content. What I did manage to catch is the example of the Easter Island society and while I never played there is a game called Giants. I think that is a management game where you face done of the issues surrounding that particular collapse. Anyone have real experince with the game to help clarify that impression?

Tom M

Some further notes: I went and looked up Giants really quick. It is indeed about Easter Island but it doesn’t seem to be the scarce resource game I’d imagined it to be. Is it possible I’m thinking of something else?

I don’t know the game you’re talking about. However, I looked at the BGG page for Giants, and then followed the Family link to the section to Country: Chile to see if there were other obvious Easter Island games. I didn’t see anything jumping out at me like that, but I have to repost the description of the game “Easter Island” because it made me laugh:

I had completely forgotten that Pax Renaissance was in the works. I can’t wait to get my hands on that once it releases. Pax Porfiriana ranks up there in my top 20 games of all time (and considering how many games I’ve played over the last decade, that’s no small feat).

Also interested in Greenland, but it looks like I’ll have to wait for the buzz to die down a bit before I’ll be able to grab a copy.

If history with Pax is any indication now is the time to get Greenland. I think supply is only drying on this one. You can get it right now for $35 plus whatever shipping is from Funagain. I’ve got no particular attachment to those guys beyond having bought Here I Stand and another game or two from them.

Tom M

Has anyone played both Pax Porfiana and Lords of the Sierra Madre, and able to compare them? I have the latter, but am now intrigued by the former.