Blood Rage designer’s Trudvang Legends is a massively ambitious Norse roleplaying board game

The next game from Blood Rage creator Eric Lang is a huge co-op board game with an ambitious evolving world and ongoing story campaign.

Trudvang Legends is based on the Norse-flavoured tabletop RPG Trudvang Chronicles, and has been designed to offer a similar scope of fantasy world and storytelling, but as a GM-less board game.

One of Trudvang Legends’ headline features is the ‘Legends system’, which lets players experience an ongoing campaign across dozens of separate hour-long playthroughs. Like fellow epic Gloomhaven, the players’ decisions can have effects on the world and send them down different branches of the story towards a variety of endings. The game comes with a 'Book of Sagas' that players consult to see how events play out – and make choices to influence the outcome.

These decisions manifest on the board itself, which has a number of ‘pockets’ used to store cards and change the world for future playthroughs. The sleeves store the cards between games, meaning the game can be paused and resumed by folding up the board. Despite the persistent world, Trudvang Legends isn’t a legacy game – the whole game can be fully reset to start afresh.

Players’ characters earn experience by exploring and fighting monsters. The equipment, upgrade and powers they buy are based on the world’s different elements and guide each character down one of several ‘legendary paths’ that culminate in a particular ending for the character based on their decisions. While characters can essentially retire as ‘legends’ during a campaign, players can have the option to play as their descendants, starting with different benefits as the result of their previous actions. The classes are based on the tabletop RPG.

Combat and tests are resolved using a bag-building system; players pull runes from a bag that they can then assign to attacks, spells and abilities. Pulling too many ‘demonic’ runes means failing a test, with story consequences based not only on whether players pass or fail but how much they pass or fail by – so pushing your luck to change the strength of the outcome can have a significant impact. 

Trudvang Legends is up on Kickstarter now, where it’s already rocketed up to more than £600,000 in pledges. The campaign will run until August 15th, with the game due out late in 2020.