It’s time for the annual barrel bowling contest to take place! Do you have what it takes to capture the most gold in this years Kinderspiel award winning game Valley of the Vikings?!

What is Valley of the Vikings? 

Valley of the Vikings is a dexterity game where players will compete in barrel bowling, aiming to strategically knock down the barrels they need to earn the most points and win the game.

How do you play?

Every player will choose one of the four colored viking ships that they will use to hold their gold and represent their viking throughout the game. 

Barrels of the four vikings are placed in the center of the board.

Play proceeds in clockwise direction. On your turn, you will take the ball and the bat to the corner closest to you. You’ll use the bat to hit the ball into the barrels, trying to knock them over. If you miss, you get to hit again until you have knocked over at least one of the four barrels. 

For each barrel that you knocked over, you will move the matching Viking token one space further along the dock.

When a viking falls off of the dock, the current player’s turn ends immediately, no more Vikings are moved along the dock, and scoring takes place. 

Players are awarded coins based on their position on the dock, and place those coins into their viking ship. The player whose viking fell into the water is awarded no coins and returns to the front of the dock.

After a player has moved one or more viking tokens or after coins have been distributed, it is the next players turn. They will place all of the overturned barrels onto the board into any space they like, grab the bat and ball, and take their turn. 

Game End

The game ends when all the coins have been distributed. The player with the most coins wins.

What do we think?

Haba makes some of the best games for kids and Valley of the Vikings is another that does not disappoint. 

Production wise, everything in the box is high quality and made to last. The viking ships are such a fun 3 dimensional element to the game and add an extra bit of flair when storing your coins. We loved jingling our ships full of coins when playing.

I found Valley of the Vikings enjoyable when playing with our kids and also with our adult friends. This is essentially a tabletop bowling game with some strategy thrown in and it really works.

There’s something about the silly fun of whacking over those barrels that brings out the kid in everyone. We were laughing the whole time!

I was so surprised by not only how well this worked for kids to play, (duh, what kid wouldn’t love this??) but also by just how much our adult gaming group loved it. 

When our kids played, other than our oldest (7,) not much strategy was used. They just tried to knock over all the barrels they could, giggling all the while. Playing it with older players is where the strategy of figuring out when to hit another players’ barrel to move them along the dock or not comes into play. 

The hilarity of watching someone prepare their perfect shot to take out an opponent only to miss wildly and hit the one barrel they didn’t want makes the game. 

You’d think it would be a lot easier to hit those barrels over than it is. It’s a lot of silly fun. 

Valley of the Vikings is a great game for families with little ones as well. Our 3 and 2 year old are much too young to play this on their own but happily join mom and dad’s team and still get all of the fun of knocking down the barrels and moving the pieces. The strategy will miss players younger than that 6 year mark, but I love that they can still have fun playing with the rest of the crew.

We highly recommend checking out Valley of the Vikings, winner of the 2019 Kinderspiel des Jahres award!

A special thank you to HABA for sending us a copy of Valley of the Vikings to play and review. As always our thoughts and opinions are our own.

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Game Info:
Title: Valley of the Vikings
2-4 players Ages 6+
Designer: Marie Fort, Wilfried Fort
Artist: Maximillian Meinzold
Publisher: HABA

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