Vikings - Across The Oceans
Reviewer: El Leon Designer: Mathias Koester	The Vikings explore and plunder -- perhaps conquer -- western Europe and North America. Map size. 195 x 93 (A huge map!) Timespan: 793 AD to 1066 (270 turns)
Overall Score: 26.5
This is a highly playable mix of exploration and plunder -- quite Viking-esque. The scenario features creatively used events and deserves to be played... It will definitely be enjoyed!
Playability: 8.5
While the scenario is very entertaining, especially due to the possibilities of exploring north America, Greenland and Iceland, there is a little problem with dead time. I ended up spending much time waiting for units to be built or to get across the vast world. Not r eally a great flaw (especially among good players who won't loose their units in the first turns), but somehow making the action run faster could help. The atmosphere was well created, with events listing dates and characters. It is one of those scenarios that intrigue you and want to make you learn more about history. My only possible complaint is wanting a more detailed pedia for the wonders. The scenario seems well balanced. Cities are difficult to take but not impossible. Maybe one complaint could be that in the beginning you get several "ulfheonor" (again an entry in the readme could help those of us intrigued by these names), which never again arise once they are killed. Maybe with random turn events you could get some more. One of the most praisable a spects of this scenario is the fact that you can play it many times. While the Vikings are the main characters, three other tribes have enough interesting things to do. Again, this success is largely the result of the exploration options.
Level of General Care: 9
The map is quite interesting, and in fact quite novel as it encompasses Europe and North America. No irrelevant places are in the map, and all that is relevant to the history of the vikings has been generally included. The documentation is good, and in fact it does really help one get into the scenario without spending the first ten turns completely lost. The tech tree is solid and there is good attention to detail, but like I said the civilopedia could cover more terrain. One question I was left with is why there was a pedia file in the zip if it is unaltered.
Artwork/Originality: 9
The artwork is quite a good cocktail mix of original and previously existing graphics, though some of Mathias' units have a blurry look to me. But it is tremendous work and deserves praise. Those Inuit cities by Mathias Koester are simply wonderful (too bad you don't get to see them as often). The exploration ideas, as well as the money-making events (hunting reindeer, whales, polar bears, chopping lumber, plunderi ng villages) are quite well used to good effect. A great idea is the storms, a series of changeterrain events that change ocean to ocean, effectively destroying ("sinking") any unit in the storm areas (with a nice wav thunder, too).

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