Doggerland review: "A delicate dance of survival and management that doesn't feel weighted toward a single strategy"

An economics-based board game set in 15,000 BC might sound like a drag, but Doggerland manages to deliver a fascinating dive into Palaeolithic nomad life that's both inspired and complex. Drawing on real-world histories of cultures now lost to the sea, it puts an esoteric twist on what could have been a very dry strategy game of berry-picking and stick huts.

Pairing map-reveal mechanics with resource management and worker placement engine building, Doggerland sees players exploring and gathering from the rich land, taking down big game, and making use of their haul to design, craft, and construct all manner of innovations that will leave echoes for their ancestors to uncover. As are many of the best board games around, Doggerland is a game of balancing risk with reward, while also pooling your resources to grow your tribe against the odds as you compete for resources and learn to bend nature to your will.

You might decide your best strategy is shifting around the growing lands with the migrating megafauna, or staying put and organising deep excursions into the unknown. You feel it's a safer bet to set up shop by the water and focus on creating handicrafts from foraged shells and grow your tribe by asking your shaman to bless you with twins. However you choose to play, the aim is simple: Survive the seasons, and learn to thrive in an ever-changing landscape.

Features & design

• Hunt and forage for food and materials
• Create things and make babies to earn points
• Work toward shared goals

Playing as a tribe of hunter-gatherers, players work through a number of phases per round. Four distinct goals are set at the start for everyone to achieve as they see fit as the game progresses through the seasons, flip-flopping between summer and winter every round. As time goes on resources become more scarce, and animals will shift around the map making it harder for a growing tribe to survive.

Play begins by programming actions, then taking it in turns you move through the phases systematically, revealing tiles, resolving actions, migrating animals, and finally feeding your tribe and moving your village in the last phase of each round. Once eight rounds are up (six in a shorter game), players count up their points and lessen them by any scarcity tokens, to reveal a winner.

When programming your actions, you're presented with several options. These include creative endeavors like painting a fresco, building or upgrading a habitat, creating a handicraft, erecting a megalith, or makin' babies -wink-. Before any of that can occur, you'll need to set about gathering resources since everything has a cost associated with it. For most actions you'll need to spend a tool, alongside any other material costs. In winter, outdoor activities also require a fur so your people don't freeze. Handicrafts can be made indoors so just require a tool, whereas building a new hut will leave you exposed to the elements. To gain resources, and to add animals to your collective memory for fresco painting, you'll need to first organise an expedition.

Expeditions come in two forms: gathering and hunting. Gathering is simple. Send a number of people to a space, and gain the number of resources noted on that tile per person. Hunting requires a certain level of mastery to succeed, however. While there are no actual battle mechanics in Doggerland, you won't be able to take on a beast if you can't match the mastery score required. Mastery is calculated by the number of hunter-gatherers, plus their tools, with the chief offering a small mastery bonus.

There are some limitations when it comes to expeditions, such as the number of spaces you can move from your village and the three-person max on gathering, but the main consideration comes in how much you can carry back to your village. Wasting resources could spell disaster, so you have to calculate your resource gains carefully. Thankfully, while there's no 'tech tree' so to speak, you're able to advance your tribes skillset to increase their movement, carry capacities, and tool production ability, so you can reduce waste and fully utilise the bounty of Doggerland. That is, as long as someone else doesn't get there first.

Resources can and will be exhausted as play goes on. Animals will migrate away if you don't kill them, and while you can follow them around, certain animals will also respawn depending on the season.

Throughout play, you'll want to make use of your shaman's magic which can grant some immense boons. While the shaman can't hunt large game, they can magically induce twin births, help you paint a perfect fresco, let you steal the first player token, or even build megaliths to really make your mark on the land. You'll have to make sure that, by the time the resolution phase rolls around, you'll have the materials to pay for the shaman's services.

The same is true for anything else with a resolution cost that you've decided to program, though programming costs like tools and fur must be paid upfront. Anything you can't pay for, or anyone left without food at the end of a round, you must take scarcity tokens for.

The chief also grants many benefits, not only counting as two expedition components, but also granting extra moves and reducing costs. Whereas the usual limit for making handicrafts or painting the fresco is once per round, the chief allows another tribe member to join them on a later turn in the same round. The chief, being a clever so-and-so, also lets you construct habitats with one less wood than usual.

As for the real world production of Doggerland, these are sturdy, well thought out boards – player boards are double layered for extra satisfaction – and aside from a great, step-by-step instruction manual with actual accompanying comics in it, all the pieces are gorgeous. The wood meeples are easy to distinguish depictions of fauna, and the resources are all lovely cut-out designs of bones and meat etc. The real problem comes when they all rattle around in the resource trays and slide under the dividers, which could have been designed more rigidly.

Gameplay

• Tension rises as resources dwindle and tribe needs skyrocket
• Free expression of the stone-age kind
• Masterfully matched theme and mechanics

Doggerland is a very sandboxy engine builder. With so much agency there's a hundred different ways to approach play, and the random shared goals propel players in multiple directions at once so there's a great deal of replayability. It offers a delicate dance of survival and management that doesn't feel weighted toward a single strategy either, so you can really explore what makes you and your little cave dudes happy.

Expeditions are the real meat of Doggerland, and hunting large game is one of the biggest thrills I've had in an economics game. That's especially true when you've managed to calculate migration trajectories and intercept a mammoth with your shaman's ability to send out "infinitely long expeditions". It took me a while to figure migration out, but when I did it made so much sense as to how it all gets resolved. Then it was just a case of working through it in my head to get what I needed.

While conflict between players is indirect, it can get very heated as resources wane. Your options dwindle quickly in a four player game, too. With so many options and so much left to do all the time, tension in the last few rounds reaches an incredible peak. It's masterfully achieved, but it does mean you're lulled into a false sense of security through the game.

Unless you're going for the 6 round game mode, gameplay takes a fair while to get through. The main way I found to counteract this was to turn the resolution phase into a free-for-all. Sadly, letting players resolve everything simultaneously turns the game into a feeding frenzy. Sure, it reduces play time significantly, but it undermines what's otherwise a tranquil, systematic game.

Should you buy Doggerland?

Doggerland is full of beautiful, theme-lifting mechanics, such as adding animals killed to your collective memory for fresco painting, and a simple-yet-effective food spoilage system. Alongside varied and intricate gameplay that ramps up nicely into a crescendo, it's a game that feels truly inspired.

Doggerland has its pains – such as difficulties figuring out rules like migration, and whether your shaman can paint a perfect fresco as well as the chief in the same round – but it's a well considered game that's worth consideration for management and history buffs alike. I'm already itching to try out a new strategy myself.

Ratings

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Doggerland

We played Doggerland numerous times with different player counts over a course of weeks to get the most complete overview of its gameplay and longevity. Our reviewer also tried different tactics over each gameplay to test if it was more weighted toward one strategy.

For a more in-depth look at our process, see this guide on how we test board games. You can also find out more via GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

Want something that lets you work as a team? Don't miss the best cooperative board games. As for those wanting a head-to-head challenge, try the best 2-player board games.