About This Game

Skål! Wyrdtide is a viking survival roguelite, solo or in online co-op for up to four, where you don't wade into the horde on foot. You sail your longship straight into it. You hold the rudder and the sail; your crew mans the benches and fights on its own. Raiders come in waves that only thicken the longer you stay afloat, and every voyage ends as a saga worth telling or a wreck worth remembering.

Take the helm

The boat is your hero. Run with the wind under sail, pull a burst on the oars, and leap clear over raiders and rocks when a red mark warns of a blow about to land. Nothing can touch you in the air.

The voyage

• Cast off with one weapon. Pick a hull, a crew and a single weapon. Everything else is dealt at sea.

• Level up on the water. Sunk raiders leave shards behind. Every level deals three cards, runes or weapons, with two rerolls and a banish to fix a bad hand.

• Raid the islands. Hold your boat at the shore of a village with a flame above it until the ring closes, then take new crew, hacksilver, or gamble on crafting a rune.

• Fell the warden. Every sea has a gate, and a warden wakes beside it. Sink it, then choose: a harder tide on the same waters, or through the gate into a new sea. The voyage goes on as long as your hull holds.

Twenty weapons, each on its own mount

Deck, rail, prow, mast, sail, stern, a ring round the hull or driven through the timber itself: every weapon sits on a real mount on your boat, and most fire on their own. The Harpoon Gun, Bone Catapult and Storm Rod answer to your aim, by mouse or right stick. Each weapon learns a new attack at level 3 and again at level 5, and four of them join with a matching rune at level 5: Whale Lance, Fetter Chain, Wildfire and Thunderhead.

Crew, runes and beasts

• 27 crew types, each fighting its own way: a Skáld whose song quickens the whole ship, a Smíðr who mends the hull between raids, a Berserkr who charges out when a raider strikes the hull and sprints back aboard. Eight of them, the Draugr Row, are dead men found only on Hel's islands.

• 71 runes from common to legendary, earned through feats and carved into the mast as you level. Eight cursed runes offer great power at a real price.

• 8 beast companions, one to each boat: a raven that sharpens every blade aboard, a storm-eagle that blocks the blow that would land, an orca running silent beneath the hull, a goat that headbutts the crew back into the fight.

Thirteen hulls

Five hulls sail from the first voyage. The other eight are earned with hacksilver or with deeds. Every hull rewrites the run: how many crew it seats, how many weapons it mounts, how it turns and how much of a beating it can take. Race in the Færing, hold the line with the nine benches of the Busse, go to war in the Langskip, or fell the warden of Hel to sail the Draugskip, a ghost ship that flies above the waves. And somewhere out there is Naglfar, the ship of nails.

Six seas, four tides

Start in the summer fjord of Jondalheim, then fight on through Salt Fjord, the snowbound Ashen Skerries, the steam-and-iron works of the dvergar in Lodde Fjord, and the burning seas of Hel, where the undead wander. Beyond them waits The Jotun's Stair, where giants carved the tide into steps. Each sea opens once you fell the warden of the one before it on Tide I and II, and each runs on four tides, ending with the Drowning Tide. Somewhere between the seas, a hidden water waits to be found.

Co-op for up to four

Host a lobby for up to four players, each captain on their own boat with their own hull, crew and loadout, on one sea against the same rising tide. Sink, and a crewmate can sail to your wreck and haul you back up. If no one reaches you, you rejoin on the next tide. Some runes exist only in co-op, like Fjötra, which chains every boat in the fleet together in exchange for +50% damage.

Curses for the brave

Before you cast off, you can lay curses on the voyage: fog that halves your sight, swifter dead, no hull repair. Each one you take pays out in extra hacksilver.

Between voyages

Hacksilver is what you bring home. Spend it on hulls, crew types, weapons and beasts, drill the whole crew to a higher level, and fill the bestiary with everything you meet at sea. New to the sea? Heimvik, the home bay, teaches a voyage step by step, and nothing can sink you there.