Viking Route is a solo and cooperative game from Kickstarter back in December 2024. I backed at the Jarl level and my copy arrived early August 2026. It had promised delivery October 2025, so it’s almost a year late! That’s Kickstarter for you!

This game made our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2026! Why were we so excited for it??? Magnets and Vikings!!! You heard me, Magnets!!! And Vikings!!!

How on earth does this board game use magnets??? Let’s tale a closer look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

See game above with Can of Coke for perspective!

There’s a big bad boss loose in the world, and it’s your job to deal with it! See the 5 bosses above! Each boss plays very differently too!

Players play 4 Vikings sailing the seas! Each Viking has a special power activated by discarding Clan Spirit tokens! See characters above! No matter the number of players, there must always be 4 Vikings in play. A solo player will operate all 4 vikings, 4 players will each get their own viking, 2 players would each get 2 vikings … (and 3 player has a weird rule).

Players are sailing the seas trying to defeat the enemy! This game is “kinda” a boss-battler, but the game is more about sailing your ship to get to the enemy and avoiding land and other things! The ship itself is sort of a worker-placement area! Each zone of the ship does something different: the Deck has the most options and is adjacent to everything, the Sail is for adjusting the sail (full-up, half-up, or all-down), the Hold is for grabbing some useful tokens, the Lookout is for adjusting the wind (sorta), and the Ballista is for shooting things!

Your ship is represented by a compass on the board! See above! When the sails are unfurled, the ship will move in the direction of the red arrow on the compass! How does the compass point? Magnets!

When you do you sail? At the end of every turn, players draw a bad news card which “usually” also moves ship in the direction of the wind! Plus some bad stuff …

There are 4 heavy magnets that affect the compass (your ship): the three ravens (scattered on the edges of the board) and “the wind”, right in the middle of the board.

See above as the ship (The Drakkar) is near the green raven, so that magnet has the most influence over the ship on that part of the board!

If you move your Viking to the Lookout, you can activate a Raven and move it around the board a little bit! See the video above as the moving Raven affects your heading on the compass!

But it’s not just the Ravens: “the wind” in the center affects you too! The direction she points has a big effect on your heading! She is actually a pretty power magnet herself! This game is all about managing the “overlapping magnetic fields” from the Ravens on the edges and “the wind” in the middle! (You can only adjust the wind in the middle if you are within two spaces).

Along the way, you have to deal with Valkyries as they slowly (and sometimes quickly) approach your ship!

Sometimes the Valkyries makes it ON the ship and damage it! See above as the sails area get damaged! You have to fight the push them off the ship! Of course, the Valkyries are immortal, so all you can do is push them away!

Combat is decided by dice! See all 6 faces of the dice above! Basically, 2 sides are misses 3 sides are plain hits, and 1 side is a critical hit! Usually a hit is good enough, but critical hits can be great, depending on the bad guy you are fighting!

Each viking sheet tells how many dice they can roll for Combat! So you “usually” want Urwulf or Helga doing combat since they roll 2 dice during an attack (Astrid and Kuba only roll 1 dice).

To win, you have to “do something” to take down the big bad boss! Usually, you have to collect all 3 Magic Stones from around the world, then hit the boss with some critical hits! There are 5 different bosses in the game, and they all operate a little differently!

That’s kinda the basics of the game! Although the tokens are fine, it’s really the whole “toy factor” with the magnets that makes this so cool!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good.

The rulebook knocks it out the park on The Chair Test! This rulebook fits perfectly next to me on the chair, it opens up easily, and is easy to read! A on Chair Test!

The components are described well and set-up of the Drakkar work well.

The Set-Up was good: see above.

In general, this rulebook was pretty good. It’s main flaw was the it seems to miss edge cases more often than it should: It’s usually edge cases in the specific monsters you are fighting that were the problem. We’d occasionally get ourselves into a situation where the rulebook didn’t answer something, so we’d just a make a ruling; it happened more often than it should have. None of the underspecificity was ever particularly egregious, but it just happened a few too many times.

Solo Play

So, there is a solo mode! Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!

Since all modes must always play Vikings, the solo player operates all 4 vikings! Normally I worry about how much context switching it takes to operate 4 completely different vikings … but the Vikings aren’t really THAT distinct! The real difference is their special power, how many dice they roll, how much they can carry, and how many hits. That’s it! It’s all very apparent on their sheets!

Each Viking has a token they place on the board to show they’ve gone (yes, I know that’s backwards; see below). Viking Route uses coarse-grained Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO)! (See description here) I love that! PSTO usually really elevates a game for me, as I feel I have more choices to get stuff done!

The context switching between characters really isn’t a big deal! I had no issue jumping right in and playing all 4 Vikings! It sounds more daunting than it is; once you’ve played once, you’ll see that it’s easy to play all 4 vikings as a solo player!

The solo game works really well. I had no problem jumping in. In fact, I ended up playing the entire campaign over 5 days as a solo player! I had the ability to leave it set-up between days, so that helped.

From a maintenance perspective, there’s a little bit of work to set-up and tear-down, but it’s not too bad. As usual, the cooperative game makes set-up and tear-down a little easier as you share the load.

Is this a good solo game? Absolutely! The choices you make about when to furl/unfurl the sails, fight or sail, directions to sail, when to move the wind or the ravens, are delicious choices! You are basically balancing keeping the ship sailing in the proper direction with all the stuff that happens along the way: Battling Valkyries! Tracking the Big Bad Boss! Grabbing Resources! Avoiding Land! The fact that there are 4 magnets with overlapping influence works really well!

Great solo game. I played the entire campaign because it was so fun.

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game was mostly just an extension of the solo game! What do I mean by that? Well, instead of making all the sailing and fighting decisions as a single player, we tended to decide things as a group! With the Player Selected Turn Order, we’d decide on which viking goes next! What do we concentrate on? Should we fight or sail? Should we unfurl? Should we reroll? Should we request Help From the Gods?

As a group, we’d play with this magnetic system! And it was fun!

The trade-off here is that multiple people playing might see something you miss, but the counterpoint is that you have to make most decisions as a group.

Everyone loved the magnets.

There is something to be a little worried about; this game is susceptible to Alpha Player Syndrome (see link here for description). If you are playing too strictly, you aren’t supposed to play with the magnets too much, and an Alpha Player might either stop you from playing with the magnets (“that’s cheating! You can’t do that!”) or maybe just say “I know how the magnets work, let me do it”.

The right thing to do: just let people play with the magnets and have fun.

The cooperative game worked; we saved our game and plan to play more games in the campaign.

The Campaign

There is a 5 game campaign with 5 different bosses. Each one plays differently, but not THAT differently.

The game proceeds in two phases: In phase 1, you have to sail around the board and get the 3 Magic Stones! That seems to be the same for every game in the campaign! Then in phase 2, you “do something” with the stones! See above as I crit hit the Kraken three times to win!

Each world has a different board with different rules! Board 2 has lots of Fog which stops you from looking at the compass! Eek!

Board 3 is in the river and Fenrir buzzes around trying to Ram you! The River makes you drift every turn!

The 4th board has a giant land mass which is a real pain to move around, and some “remnants” of the Bifrost bridge which do weird things?

The final board is Loki! He pretends to be all the monsters you already fought! I have to admit, I thought the final battle was the weakest. It seemed sort of too long and very samey. It was my least favorite of the campaign games.

Despite all that, the campaign IS fun. Each game is different enough and keeps you engaged in the world. It’s also fun between games to get upgrades for your team! That’s right! This is a campaign where you can upgrade as you go! See the Port Upgrades pages above!

Magnets

Let’s address the elephant is the room: do the magnets work? Does the game work? Yes! 100% yes and yes! After playing the solo campaign all the way through and some cooperative games, yes, I can verify that the system of magnets works! And the game works too!

It’s even quite thematic: the winds are a “mysterious, unseeing force that affects you”, and the magnets really capture that feeling!

The game also doesn’t seem too hard or too easy either. The magnets work in the game and give a nice challenge.

What I Liked

Art Style: I like the art style: it seems a good choice for a viking game.

Magnets: I love the magnets. They work! And it’s fun to play with them!

Player Selected Turn Order: Player Selected Turn Order works really well here: it helps make the game feel like your choices matter more. They even have the tokens to help notate when a turn has been taken!

Table Presence: This has a really cool table presence!

What I Didn’t Like

Underspecificity: There’s a number of places in the rulebook where the game seems underspecified. What happens when “something” happens? The rules don’t seem to handle a lot of edge cases! The rules also seem to use some variation of the phrase “if there’s a choice, players decide” quite a bit! That deferment of rules works in a cooperative game, but it always feels like a cop out to me (see Resolving Ambiguity in Cooperative Games for more discussion). I think with just a little bit of work, it could have been a bit more precise with a bit more thought. It wasn’t game-ending by any means, but a small nuisance.

Randomness: At the end of the day, this is still a dice game where rolling poorly will cause you to lose the game. There are a few mitigation techniques (Crit tokens, flipping the Ballista, re-rolling Urwulf attacks with Clan Spirit), so it’s not the end of the world if you roll poorly, but just be aware that it can be frustrating occasionally.

Conclusion

Viking Route was a big hit among me and my friends! The toy factor of the magnets was overwhelmingly fun! They designers have crafted a very good game around the magnetic pieces, and that works really well!

As a solo game, this is a 8.5/10 or 9.0/10. It might be a 9.5, but the randomness and underspecificity of the rules brought the game down just a little bit for me. But the game was so much fun, I played through the entire campaign and enjoyed it (the finale was a bit underwhelming; that also contributed to the 8.5/10 or 9/10). The game was fun and I had a blast playing it solo! And don’t worry about operating four Vikings in the solo game, as it really wasn’t an issue.

Cooperatively, this is an 8.0 or 8.5/10. The game may be a little more likely to be susceptible to Alpha Player Syndrome because of the nature of the cooperative interactions, but my friends all enjoyed how unique this game was. The randomness and underspecificity of the solo game are a little more pronounced in the cooperative game (as the solo player can just move through those issues a little easier without needing consensus), so it’s just a 8 or 8.5/10.

This game may just tickle your fancy that you don’t care about some of these issues! You may just give it a 9/10 or 10/10: it’s just so unique and interesting! I mean, there’s a reason this made our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2026!