After having spent over 10 hours in the world of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla it’s easy to see how much detail Ubisoft has put into each element of the game. From the Settlement that serves as a home base for Eivor, to the revamped combat and loot systems, there is a lot from the preview that will leave players wanting more. What was most unexpected, though, is how addicting one of the side games would be.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla introduces a “pub game” called Orlog that functions a little like competitive Yahtzee. Players can challenge an NPC in a number of towns to a game and try to win that opponent’s “god’s favor,” which serves as a type of Hero Power a la Hearthstone.
In fact, a lot of Orlog borrows from digital card games like Hearthstone. Players try to put “blockers” (think taunts) in the way to prevent them from taking damage, while also trying to poke holes in their opponent’s defense. The mechanics are simpler, but any who have played collectible card games should find themselves right at home in Orlog. More importantly, though, the game is just deep enough to be worth doing more than once, and fun enough to become addicting.
Each player starts with 15 HP (represented by 15 stones on the board, and the basics of Orlog involve rolling five dice with a number of images on them. The dice can have a melee attack (axe), ranged attack (arrow), melee block (helmet), ranged block (shield), or an energy steal (grabbing hand). Each of these images can also have a yellow border around them, which means that playing them also earns energy toward the player’s god’s favor.
Players and their opponent get three rounds in which to roll the dice, and in between can choose to “lock” in any of the actions that come up. The player that rolls first can respond to the actions that their opponent locked in, or they can risk another roll to eventually try to block an attack. Think of it like Yahtzee, only the player is trying to create a combination that, at the very least, blocks all incoming damage, and, in the best scenario, deals damage directly to their opponent.
After the three rounds, the dice will line up in a configuration where every blocked and unblocked attack is shown. Prior to the resolution phase, the player will be given the opportunity to use their god’s favor, which is like hero power. For the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla demo we played, the god’s favor involved dealing direct damage to the opponent based on the number of energy tokens we had accumulated. The opponent’s god’s favor – the one that we could win if victorious – added 1 health (or more depending on the energy tokens) based on every attack blocked. The player invests in their god’s favor before the real action begins.
Once the resolution phase truly begins, each die will perform its action and the player will either lose health, deal damage, or come out unscathed. Players will then use their god’s favor to attack based on the energy available.
This setup will continue until one player runs out of HP. In our case, we squeaked out a win and were able to claim the god’s favor from our opponent, to then be used in a future game of Orlog.
It might not be as involved as The Witcher 3‘s Gwent, but Orlog is still a fun mini-game with a surprising amount of depth. More importantly, it speaks to the variety of activities on offer in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Ubisoft has given players a lot to do in this world and it says a lot that we were thirsty for more Orlog after the first match was done.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla releases November 10, 2020 for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. The PS5 version will release on November 12, 2020.
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