Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
It just so happens that I spent the last month of 2025 trying not one, but two different games from the designers of Zhanguo: The First Empire, Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini: Norsewind and Kingdom Crossing. I’ll keep my thoughts brief here…by saying that the designers’ other 2025 release, Kingdom Crossing, is the better game.
Norsewind (2025, Aporta Games) is a tableau builder for 1-4 players that plays in about 15-20 minutes per player. The most surprising thing about Norsewind—besides my burning desire to call this game Norsewood, not Norsewind—is that it seems to aim so firmly towards the middle of the pack.
Players draft cards in one of five suits, which are then placed into one of the four rows of their respective kingdoms. Some cards have Viking helmets—bad—and some have shields, which are good. At the end of the game, you want to build rows that have as many or more shields than helmets, in order for a row to score.
The one wrinkle Norsewind provides is the decision point when drafting a card. When a player adds a card to their tableau, they get income based on a single building type that appears in every other row of their kingdom. Plus, a single meeple can be drafted from the two limited-supply spaces adjacent to each card slot in the market. These meeples can be added to spaces matching the color of the meeple, to help strengthen the value of buildings at the end of the game.
In a separate area outside of the market, there are sometimes castles available for purchase, used to boost the shield value of a row but to also add scoring potential to the row with prestige points. When combined with the meeple spaces showing on each building card, a row will score positive points as long as the shields outpace the helmets.
That’s really it. The buildings don’t have much variety, the castle variety comes mainly in the form of a value proposition. Finding the best castles for the lowest price, in a game that has so few cards, quickly becomes second nature, so having cash lying around for the right moment is critical. And because a player loses seven points if helmets outpace a row’s shield count, you are working hard to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Norsewind was fine, but for an experienced player who has tried dozens, if not hundreds, of other games from this category, Norsewind really struggled to stand out. There’s a little variety on how players set up the game, with four different tiles that dictate rules for each player’s kingdom rows each game from a pool of 10. Fine. But as a fan of other titles designed by these authors, I’ll pivot to Zhanguo: The First Empire and Kingdom Crossing before I revisit Viking territory.
