Daniel (@dungeondive) previews Midhalla from Afern West Games (no paid coverage), a fully co-op Viking dungeon crawl billing itself as “100% scale, 0% luck.” That’s well outside his luck-loving wheelhouse — he wants 80–90% dice and chaos — yet he came away genuinely impressed, especially by the combat. The game cycles through four phases: a tile-laying narrative exploration (with a dash of random events), a preparation phase to buy gear and build traps, the central combat phase, and rewards.
Combat has no attack rolls at all; instead a keyword system (block, armor, pierce, evasion) drives the tactics, with enemies auto-acting in a clockwise tile-activation order — some hunting heroes, the Rune Golem ignoring them to batter your gate, giving it a tower-defense flavour. He loves keyword systems (his own design uses one) and the legacy-light progression where characters reset to level one each scenario then climb to three, while town upgrades and unlocks persist. He flags shaky writing and typos in the prototype that a narrative-tile game can’t afford. A different, appealing blend of survival, tower defense and crawl.
Midhalla strips combat down to a deterministic, no-dice keyword puzzle — the opposite of Daniel’s luck-loving taste, yet it won him over. Do you prefer combat you can fully plan, or the drama of the dice?