Sometimes Google AI is your best friend – when the board game Tomten arrived on my doorstep looking like a cozy Christmas experience, I decided there had to be something more behind the name. A quick Google AI search turned up the best answer I think, “Tomten is a mythological creature from Scandinavian folklore who is often associated with the Christmas season and winter solstice.” It is worth noting that Chris, the designer of Tomten, provides a great explanation of the influences in his game! Can Tomten do more than just make us excited for snow, hot chocolate, and the festive season? Let’s find out!

You can check out Tomten on Kickstarter now! 

In Tomten, players will be attempting to complete contracts with dice in order to score Bliss (points). The person with the most points when you reach St. Knut’s Day is the winner. Points are scored by completing the contracts using dice you have in front of you. Turn order is decided by whomever is furthest behind on the games calendar. Completing contracts or resting to earn more dice will cause time to pass, so it’s good to be strategic about when and how you want to complete various contract cards.

The aim here is to match one of the three contract values with the dice you have in front of you. You need to be exact, but you can use as many dice as you want. If you wanted to use all 4 dice on your first turn to finish a 7-requirement contract you can, although it might not be advised. There are a number of contracts available that you can work on, so unless they are all mostly filled, you should have some decent choices.

There are additional dice out on the board that can be claimed. If you have less than 7 dice when you pass an available die, you get to roll it and place it in your supply to use. It’s a great system here that rewards players for moving quickly up the calendar, but their trade off is perhaps having less turns, or waiting longer for your turn to come around. This small decision makes a bigger difference than you think, which is one of my favourite mechanisms in any board game.

Once a contract card is fully completed, the player who completed it gets to take that card and place it face down in front of them. These cards will score additional points when crossing or reaching the game’s 3 holiday spaces. For the first two – Christmas and Epiphany – you score 1 point per card you have collected. When you reach St. Knut’s Day, you get 2 points per card. The game continues, moving your player piece along the calendar and scoring points around the outside of the central board until all players reach the end. The player with the most points wins!

What I’ve just laid out for you might not sound like much, but that is just one of the ways (and the most basic way) that you can play Tomten! In a space where board games so often are one thing – easy or hard, competitive or cooperative – Tomten arrives to give everyone the opportunity to play with both competitive and cooperative modes, and both a basic and advanced mode of play. Based on a holiday meant to bring people together, Fervent Workshop has made a game for everyone.

I don’t plan to do a deep dive into how the game changes when played with the advanced rules or cooperatively, but can assure you both are fantastic ways to play. In fact, I’d argue that once you’ve got a few basic games of Tomten down, you’ll likely only play with the advanced rules in the future. Still, it’s great to have options as Tomten feels like a game you can quickly introduce to new players, whether seasoned board game players or not.

In the advanced game, cards players collect will now have additional impacts on the game, which generally result in more scoring opportunities during and at the end of the game. Only certain completed cards score at specific times, and you’ll need to “tap” your cards when you use them, and rest to reset them. It takes the very simple, yet strategic base games and adds 2-3 new concepts. This creates a deeper, more engaging Tomten experience.

Add in a cooperative mode, where players need to score 77 bliss together, and the team mode, and there are so many different ways to play this game. This will quickly become our go-to game this holiday season, and will likely get tabled more than games like Santa’s Workshop simply because of the ease of play. This is a big package in a small box, and one I’m glad to own.