Santa has his hands full and Christmas is just around the corner. What is worse, all his Elven helpers aren’t well. In such circumstances Santa asked for help from his closest friends - the Vikings. You are the leader of one of the mighty Viking Horde which came to the shores of The Grateful Island. Your goal is to visit the local town homes and – obviously - deliver presents. Then you can in turn collect the tokens of gratitude left there for Santa!

Giftbringer is a roll&write game. To play you’ll need 4 six-sided dice, the Rulebook and for each placer a pen/pencil and a Player Sheet. Before the start of the game randomly determine the Merry Leader (rolling player).

The game itself consists of 10 Rounds. At the beginning of each Round the Merry Leader rolls the 4 six-sided dice. All players write down the roll results in the slots for the given Round on their Player Sheets. The results of the roll are the numbers that the players can use that Round. For each die roll the player can cross off a die symbol on one of the Vikings, one of the Roads or one of the Houses. Alternatively he can use one or two of those die rolls for a Special Action (Santa's Blessing), but each Special Action can only be used once per game.

Initially each player has to Recruit a Viking - without one he cannot Visit the town itself. This also applies if a Viking already delivered all his Presents and the player has to Recruit another one. After having the first available Viking the player has to choose one of the Ships on the map to start his journey (this cannot be changed later, even with a new Viking). From that ship he can then start crossing the die symbols on Roads and Houses to visit them. He cannot jump over Houses or Roads and can only progress to an unvisited Road/House, adjacent to any of his already visited Roads/Houses.

When a player crosses the die symbol on a Road segment leading to a House (including crossing a potential die symbol on the House itself), he visits the House. Then he has to cross the required number of Presents on his Viking (and the House) in order to get the token of gratitude available there (which he writes down under his Viking). Once all gratitude token spaces of a Viking are filled, that Viking has done his job and cannot be used anymore - the player has to Recruit another one. If a Happiness symbol is also present on the House, after delivering the Presents for that House the player marks the next available Happiness token on his track.

After completing the last Round the player with the most points will be the winner of the game. Points are scored for each collected token of gratitude and for the achieved level of Happiness on a given player's Happiness track. Additionally, the final score can be influenced by the number of a given type of collected tokens of gratitude (e.g. 15 points for collecting 8 Cookies).

100 Strategic Games for Pen and Paper