Greenland

About this board game

Greenland is a tableau-building board game for 1–3 players, with play lasting about 120 minutes. Set between the 11th and 15th centuries, it places the Tunit, Norse, and Thule tribes in a struggle for food, resources, technology, and survival.

Each turn represents one generation. Send your population to hunt native species, gather resources, colonize the New World, raid rival tribes for wives or animals, or advance a hunter into an elder. Hunting can bring new people, resources, hand cards, wives, and technologies—but some hunters may never return.

The game unfolds through six phases, with every player completing each phase in turn order:

• Resolve events: Face elder deaths, migrations, feuds, global cooling, and trade-ship auctions.
• Assign hunters: Commit your population to hunting, gathering, raiding, colonization, or elder promotion.
• Negotiate: Bribe opponents to withdraw peacefully, arrange marriages, or launch attacks with a War Chief Elder.
• Resolve hunting: Roll for each hunter, modified by technologies and marriages.
• Maintain livestock: Pay to keep domesticated animals.
• Take elder actions: Pursue invention, domestication, proselytization, witch-burning, or conversion to monotheism.

Greenland challenges you to work around severe weather, dwindling natural resources, livestock costs, and an increasingly hostile New World. You must also decide whether your tribe follows polytheism or monotheism: your chosen worldview changes how you score, rewarding successful hunts or resource gathering.

Negotiate, compete, and adapt as your tribe supports children, elders, and livestock in a changing climate. Historically, the climate grew frigid and all but the Thule died out—a harsh backdrop for every generation in Greenland.