Looot

In Looot, you are vikings, arriving in new lands and plundering resources for your own reward. Players have a shared board where booty is found and claimed, but each have their own individual board to puzzle over back home: where your ill-gotten gains get transformed: into points!

The shared board is a different size depending on the number of players, but basically shows the resources you can claim by putting one of your vikings into a hex (wood, sheep, axes, gold) and the buildings you can claim by either placing next to them (the easily-taken houses) or linking them together with your vikings (watchtowers) or simply having at least 4 of your vikings connected to them (the alluring castles). Why are you doing this, and what do you hope to achieve? – Let’s go through a sample turn.

You must always place a viking in a free hex, and it must either go next to another viking (-any colour) or the longship tiles perched on the coast. When you place a viking, you get the resource there and, depending on context, possibly claim buildings too. Whatever you take is placed onto your player board, wherever you like – but, the location is important, as we’ll see.

Then you have the option of claiming a longship tile, and adding this to your board as well. The longships will increase your score, but you need to surround them with certain resources, as printed on the tile itself. Once that is done you can flip the longship over to its reward side. For example, each castle has a base value 4 points and so three castles would be 12 points. But if you ‘complete’ a longship that gives each castle +3, now your three castles are worth 21 points instead. All the longships have this value-boosting ability, while the three buildings you start with already on your player board – which also need x resources to be flipped over – simply score points. And these longship bonuses basically apply to all the things you can claim – buildings and resources – so the challenge is to synchronise them in the best possible way.

There are a couple of other wrinkles but that is largely the game: a conflict of interest on the shared board, and a solo puzzle on your own where the player who best combines the tiles they take with the bonuses they have will win!