Sagas of the Icelanders - Critique

After playing 5 sessions of Sagas of the Icelanders, here are my criticisms of the game.

1) I read a number of the sagas that the game was supposed to emulate. The game as written does not lend itself to creating sagas. The sagas are about larger than life characters. They achieve great things and deal with large issues. They don't deal with tracking resources. They have successful households that generate enough food and resources that the main characters are free to pursue other parts of life. Having the Man as one of the main playbooks and having most of his moves revolve around generating resources just did not emulate the stories of the sagas. I mostly disregarded resources and let the players have what they wanted if it moved the story along. I could have easily made the characters' lives interesting in having them have to scrounge for food and warmth every season, but that was not what the sagas were about.

2) Handling the passage of time in the game is very erratic. The Man gathers resources at the beginning of each session, but spends resources at every season. We played some sessions that were only part of a season and one session that spanned an entire year. With multiple sessions in a season, it is easy to have enough to survive, but with a single resource roll to survive a year just about guarantees starvation. Along with this, is the advancement that occurs at the end of each winter. If you play out each season with great detail, advancement stalls. If you try to speed the passage of time, characters develop too quickly.

3) The game is set in a fixed period of time with a defined culture. This greatly limits a lot of the creativity that is allowed to flow in other Powered by the Apocalypse games. Players either need to commit to knowing something about the culture to play within the assumptions used to build the game or be willing to redefine the history but still keep the cultural norms used to write the playbooks. My players found the playbooks to be limiting to the actions that they wanted to pursue.

4) I did not like the way fronts were presented in the book. The three subthemes presented for each god were disjointed. They did not contribute to making unified fronts that flowed together. Maybe an example of a completely developed front would have been useful. Reading Apocalypse World after the fact made building fronts more clear.

5) Some of the recurring actions in the sagas were left out of the game. Reciting verses, visiting Norway for trade or politics, and resolving issues at the Althing were all left out. Each of these could be addressed by writing custom moves, but since they were key issues in the sagas, I think they should have been included in the core game.

Would I play SotI again? Yes, if others were enthusiastic about it, or if I was trying to introduce new players to RPGs that were not interested in fantasy or sci-fi settings. Would I suggest playing a game of SotI again? Not in the near future. If I were to take up the setting again, I would try my hand at hacking Cortex Plus instead.