Doggerland Board Game Review

Written by Dan York

Now lost beneath the cold North Sea, Doggerland was an area of land inhabited by humans thousands of years ago. In the 21st century, however, Doggerland is an action-programming based eurogame for one to four players. How things change! In Doggerland, players each take the role of a tribe of hunter-gatherers who must explore their changing terrain, hunting for food and expanding their social civilisation. 

Playing Doggerland

The game plays mostly like a typical euro-style game, collecting resources and using them to generate points or more efficient actions. These actions include building upgrades, buying point-scoring tiles, and sending your tribe on expeditions to gather natural resources, or to hunt down larger and angrier resources from the various animal denizens of the land.

Doggerland’s key feature is that, instead of taking turns to perform actions, players take turns programming their intended actions, placing meeples and resources down onto the board until everyone has used all their workers. Then in a separate phase, everyone simply resolves all of their turn simultaneously, busily retrieving meeples from the board and gathering their resources or scoring their objectives. 

Most actions are carried out by a single worker, with any additional costs not needing to be paid until resolution, letting you speculate on getting something you don’t have the resources for right now, knowing you can get them from another place this turn. Though one of the main actions takes many more meeples, sending your tribe on expeditions to the board is a group effort, usually costing you several workers in one go to efficiently slay a local reindeer for its pelt and meat.

There are other fun things to do on the board, including using your special shaman piece to claim very powerful once-per-game effects, choosing when to use each of these correctly is often the key to victory in Doggerland. Failing that, you can always let two tribe folk stay at home and “make” a new tribe member for the next round. 

Doggerland is all about planning. Choosing which actions to program each round is the core of the game and being able to effectively plan out what resources you will need and what you can access is the primary gameplay driver. I really enjoy this aspect of the game, though if you’re prone to heavy analysis paralysis then you should be wary. I tend to live and let live and take a vibes-based approach to my turns, and it rarely turns out too badly.

There’s a lot of scope for skill, which is fantastic, and I love losing to my friends who have figured out how to best use the system.  Everyone will always have slightly different access to resources and actions depending on how they’ve moved their settlements between rounds and it’s very satisfying to shrewdly notice that someone might be struggling for wood this round if you choose to send a small expedition out to the only forest that you can both access.

Doggerland Review

While I’m talking about expeditions, I should say that they are easily my favourite part of the game. The large animals to hunt are represented by chunky, screen-printed wooden shapes which tower over your normal tribe folk and spending a programming turn to deposit most of your meeples and a pile of supplies onto their tile has the thrill of going all-in in a hand of poker. It’s shamelessly fun to know that you’ve spent the majority of your opportunities this round on a single large action and that it will result in you collecting a landslide of pelts, bones and meat to keep your tribe fed for the coming winter months.  

Most actions are taken piecemeal, efficiently using a single worker and a modest stack of resources to construct a new hut to live in or make a handcraft for endgame scoring, but hunting is a showstopper action that you get to do every so often, and building up to it is often a big part of the game’s flow. Another positive feature of the hunting mechanic is that it serves to tie many other of the game’s options together. Bringing down large mammals lets you slot their meeple into your player board, in your tribes “collective memory”, which you can later spend on painting a fresco.

Scoring for painting is competitive with an element of majority control, so tactically taking a round off to do nothing but hunt sometimes also means getting ahead in a tight race for bonus points at the end.

The animals are the star of the show in Doggerland, each round new ones will be placed down depending on if it’s a cold or warm season, and any that go untouched by the players will migrate around the board, settling in new and predictable locations every round. This encourages people to visit the edge of the board, causing more tiles to be placed, potentially revealing more spots for mammoths and wild horses to appear from. 

Related article: The Best Animal Games

The production is good. There’s clearly been a lot of care put into the choice of components, which helps make the game feel tactile and engaging. The game uses at least eight different types of resources and they each have a uniquely shaped wooden piece, these could easily have been a series of flavoured cubes, but the decision to make everything look the part is appreciated.

Double-layered player boards with many different places to socket and store meeples and tokens is always a plus for me personally and even the first player marker gets a VIP treatment as it’s used by the holder to track down the round-by-round itinerary. 

Overall, no notes really. Doggerland is a solid worker placement game which strives to mix up the usual format by pushing the cognitive load into the start of each round, instead of being a constant barrage of strategic decisions.  If you’re prone to losing yourself in a mind-palace when playing strategy games, then this game will certainly give you space to explore that, but you also don’t have to hold a master’s degree in planning studies to enjoy playing.

I quite appreciate the flow of the game, there’s moments of intense strategy and quiet, interspersed with flurries of activity, bridged by some unusually fun admin as you grow the map, spawn and migrate new animals around the board, and check to see if anyone has scored any objectives.

The scoring is all at the end, but it’s also all face up during the game, so there are no sudden shocks when it comes to people hiding secret objectives and you can keep a rough track of how well everyone is doing as you play. For us, we found that in the first few rounds, no one has access to any points at all, and it can feel like a pipe dream to even score a single point, but there’s a sudden and marked ramped up of victory point acquisition around the halfway point that escalates into the final actions of the game. 

Verdict

This is a must play game. A great struggle for resources interlaced with a very satisfying planning puzzle. Hard to fault Doggerland for anything, really. A fairly in-depth game that rewards planning with a little bit of player interaction, Doggerland will appeal to anyone who enjoys sitting down with a puzzle and some adversaries – like a Feast for Odin, for example.

About this board game

Designer: Laurent Guilbert, Jérôme Daniel Snowrchoff

Publisher: Super Meeple

Time: 30-120m

Players: 1-4 players

Ages: 14+

Price: £60

What’s in the box?

• 1 Double-sided tray 
• Season ring 
• 69 Terrain Tiles 
• 24 Habitat Tiles 
• 18 Craft Tiles 
• 54 Exhaustion Pawns 
• 4 Game aids
• 12 Fresco Tiles 
• 28 Printed Animal Meeples 
• 24 Famine Tiles
• 8 Objective Tiles
• Migration Arrow 
• 210 Resource and Tool Pawns 
• 2 Resource Trays
• 4 Player Boards 
• 4 Village pawns 
• 48 Clan meeples 
• 12 Megalith Pawns
• 80 Marking cubes
• 8 Shaman tokens
• 1st player Hut
• 30 Single player mode cards
• 2 Solo meeples
• Solo Shaman action tile
• 11 Solo objective tiles