Battle Troll: Man-to-Man Combat as depicted in the Icelandic Sagas

Battle Troll, game of Icelandic Sagas.

The man thrust at Gisli with a spear, but Gisli struck off the spear-head from the shaft with his axe, and the blow was so stout that the axe passed on to the rock beneath, and one horn of the edge broke off. Then he throws away the axe and clutches his sword and fights with it, and shields himself with his shield. They attack him bravely, but he kept them off like a man...

• The Saga of Gisli Sursson

The world of the sagas is a world of proud and irascible men with touchy tempers and big axes, and how their bad manners as tourists are matched by an astonishing inability to get along with the neighbors. It’s like the Wild West, without the schoolmarm and the preacher, held on a cold windy coastline.

It's about blood-feuds, and raids, and quarrels, and blood-feuds, and stealing other people's stuff and taking one another to the rowdiest courts in the world, and blood-feuds, and being exiled to the far-flung reaches of the world and behaving just as badly there. It's about visiting other lands, meeting interesting people, and hacking them about with ironmongery and looting churches because that's where the gold and silver are kept. It's about you, me, Onund the dog-faced and his foster father Sven going over to see the farmer across the river to tell him exactly what we think of him.

Personal combat in the Norse sagas is notable for its combination of grim humor, gymnastic violence and a graphic interest in the details of wounds, especially those with fatal consequences. Battle-Troll is all about that, a fast, bloodthirsty game simple enough to play after several horns of mead. Stolen mead, from a looted monastery.

Also available: Battle Troll Action Deck: 52 cards - 4 sets of player turn cards; two End of Turn cards; and two complete Combat decks, with Attack and Defense strategies and card-sized Combat Results table.

—description from the publisher