When looking for a fun strategy game to play on my mac, I searched for a long time with no luck, until I finally found Northgard. It is a game that has never come up on my radar but I gave it a chance. Within the first few hours, I fell in love with its unique style.

This game is not meant to be an open ended hour-long empire building game but rather provides an intense and entertaining match-based experience. My brother and I have been dueling on small/medium maps, sometimes with AI, and matches like that typically last 1-2 hours. This allows you to take a break and enjoy the game without the fear of losing an entire day to it.

Onto the game itself. Northgard is themed around vikings. You pick a clan (each clan has unique abilities) and spawn on a randomized tile-based island map. You start with a town hall and some villagers on a starting coastal tile with everything else dark. You build various buildings and assign villagers to become specialists (ie woodcutters at a woodcutters lodge, or scouts at a scout camp) at those buildings. As you explore new tiles, you may colonize adjacent ones to your territory as long as they are free of NPC enemies (ie wolves, bears, undead, etc). Each tile is large and allows for you to build 2-4 buildings on it. Each tile also has some unique value to it. Some tiles may have food resources, or forests for wood, allowing you to build special buildings there or gain some kind of bonus. You will also find NPC civilizations trading with whom also gives you unique bonuses once you befriend them (or you can wipe them out if you want).

There are a number of ways to win the game. You can destroy all you opponents. You can win by Wisdom by having the most technology unlocked in the research tree. You can win by fame, which is acquired through certain special buildings, capturing wolf dens or draugr tombs, and by colonizing tiles. You can win by trade, which I cant say much about because Ive never gone for that victory. Lastly, you can win through a unique tile that generates with each map (ie, sometimes there might be a tile with the Yggdrasil tree on it. Capturing it is very hard but if you take that tile, you win).

You control your armies and villagers on a precise level, meaning you can select and direct individual villagers. Each match in Northgard is rarely spent waiting and almost always has you thinking and about your next move or otherwise performing it. Each match may start out relatively similar but becomes unique and interesting after the first 30 min, and the endgame, which is about the last 30 min to 1 hour, is always super fun.

This game might not satisfy your cravings to build a huge civilization, but for a sufficiently immersive match-based strategy experience, it rocks!

Criticism: You can't rotate your camera, but this isn't a big deal

When looking for a fun strategy game to play on my mac, I searched for a long time with no luck, until I finally found Northgard. It is a game that has never come up on my radar but I gave it a chance. Within the first few hours, I fell in love with its unique style. This game is not meant to be an open ended hour-long empire building game but rather provides an intense and entertaining match-based experience. My brother and I have been dueling on small/medium maps, sometimes with AI, and matches like that typically last 1-2 hours. This allows you to take a break and enjoy the game without the fear of losing an entire day to it. Onto the game itself. Northgard is themed around vikings. You pick a clan (each clan has unique abilities) and spawn on a randomized tile-based island map. You start with a town hall and some villagers on a starting coastal tile with everything else dark. You build various buildings and assign villagers to become specialists (ie woodcutters at a woodcutters lodge, or scouts at a scout camp) at those buildings. As you explore new tiles, you may colonize adjacent ones to your territory as long as they are free of NPC enemies (ie wolves, bears, undead, etc). Each tile is large and allows for you to build 2-4 buildings on it. Each tile also has some unique value to it. Some tiles may have food resources, or forests for wood, allowing you to build special buildings there or gain some kind of bonus. You will also find NPC civilizations trading with whom also gives you unique bonuses once you befriend them (or you can wipe them out if you want). There are a number of ways to win the game. You can destroy all you opponents. You can win by Wisdom by having the most technology unlocked in the research tree. You can win by fame, which is acquired through certain special buildings, capturing wolf dens or draugr tombs, and by colonizing tiles. You can win by trade, which I cant say much about because Ive never gone for that victory. Lastly, you can win through a unique tile that generates with each map (ie, sometimes there might be a tile with the Yggdrasil tree on it. Capturing it is very hard but if you take that tile, you win). You control your armies and villagers on a precise level, meaning you can select and direct individual villagers. Each match in Northgard is rarely spent waiting and almost always has you thinking and about your next move or otherwise performing it. Each match may start out relatively similar but becomes unique and interesting after the first 30 min, and the endgame, which is about the last 30 min to 1 hour, is always super fun. This game might not satisfy your cravings to build a huge civilization, but for a sufficiently immersive match-based strategy experience, it rocks! Criticism: You can't rotate your camera, but this isn't a big deal