Looot - Pillage and Raid to Become Leader of The Vikings | Casual Strategy Game Night | Ages 10+ | 2 to 4 Players | 45 Minutes

I went into Looot with low expectations. I thought gameplay would be lackluster and simplistic. I was very wrong.The gameplay is easy, but has a great deal of strategy. The scaling and variability of the setup is fantastic. We really liked they the board changed size to fit the player count.The rules left a bit of questions and could have used some additional revisions, but all questions were answered through reviewing a few times.Artwork blends together a bit too much for my taste. It is nice art though.

My husband and I loved this game. It's fairly easy to learn, but our personal strategies will take us a while to develop, which is exactly the type of challenge we like in a game. I have no doubt our eleven-year-old will also enjoy the game, though I'm not certain our youngest, who's a few-months-shy of the recommended starting age of ten, will be able to manage the logic. Kids vary on logic skills at this age, so I don't think it's a stretch to recommend it for ten-years-old though.Set-up was easy once we figured it out, but this is the one area of the game we didn't like, since the directions were confusing here. Initially, the manual said to set up three castles in their corresponding spaces, but this didn't work for a two-player game since using the allotted two landscape boards for two players only offers two castle locations, not three. Additionally, one landscape board is missing castle locations on both sides, so that leads us to believe the instructions listed are for four players only. Grabbing the castle-free board (as we did at first) makes the set-up even more confusing for two players. Once we figured that out and that the instructions were likely written poorly for setup, getting the rest of the game laid out for play went smoothly.Fortunately, that was the only area where the instructions were confusing that we could find, and gameplay was easy to pick up from that point. As mentioned, strategy will take time, especially since there are a lot of small rules to memorize that change how we'll want to place our tiles, but that's part of the fun.The quality of the game is also excellent. Everything is well-printed, thick, and appears durable. As a bonus, enough small zip-top plastic bags were included to keep all the pieces separated by category, which makes setup super fast each time. I can't express enough how much I love that. I wish every game publisher followed this example.All-in-all, this is a great game and a lot of fun despite that small confusion. It'll be in my husband's and my regular rotation going forward, especially since games with this type of strategy rarely play as well for two players as they do for more.

Looot is going to have a hard time for people searching to find it because of it's common name (Loot) and odd spelling with three O's (though clever logo looking like a viking ship). And that's a shame because it's very fun! I've heard it recommended for people who like Cascadia and Azul, both of which are hits in our house, so we wanted to give it a try. Looot has nice components and kind of a "family friends" take on vikings as you aren't attacking anyway, though I'm still unclear thematically on how the vikings are transporting houses and trees back to their fief. Either way, you are building off other players' moves on the board to collect resources and build out your own player board. It's a neat mechanic paired with more familiar tile placement rules, and that's a lot of fun. It seems a very different game at 2 players vs. 4 (which we haven't tried yet) - at two, it's more cutthroat because your options are more limited on where you can go, and if you want to play it mean by denying your opponent access to certain spots, you totally can. With more players, I imagine it would be more interesting to be able to branch off in many directions, though less strategic for the same reason. So pick which version you like best, just seems it will play differently. Fun game, easy to learn, easy to table. Highly recommend.

The game is fun (will likely top some people's top games of 2024 list) and sufficiently different from the rest in my collection that it will stay around for a while. There is a very slight chess-like feel to it. One word of caution is that, at least for a two-player game, there is the definite opportunity for "take-that" (doing something that will completely cut off your opponent from getting anywhere close to completing their strategy). When playing with the right partner that can be fun, but "take that" games can definitely cause some relationship strife if you're not of the same mindset.Reading through the rules some of the things that you have to do as the game unfolds can feel a bit overwhelming. I recommend watching some videos that play through a couple rounds so that you can see how it unfolds with someone who already understands all of the rules.Components wise, they did a fantastic job with limited exceptions. The viking meeples are fun, and the cardboard chits (and map pieces) are thick and durable. Unfortunately, they didn't put the same effort into the player boards which are super thin and easy to bend if you're not careful with them. They included a great number of baggies (in two sizes) to keep everything organized, but it seemed like they were 2-3 bags short. I ultimately had to mix some pieces together (which I otherwise would have preferred to keep separate). Not a big deal, but just calling it out since it seemed like they were intending to help you out completely.