The most obvious change was to the wood/ore space. In the old edition it was 1 wood / player and 1 ore. This was totally bizarre because all other spaces provide a fixed amount of stuff and do not vary by player count. The new one is 3 wood and 1 ore, which is just right. It is a good spot, regularly used, but certainly not overpowered.
The other changes all seem good too. Animals are improved and it seemed quite strong to have them on your farm. The exception was cows, which seem to hard to make or not good enough, one of the two. The real kicker is that horses are excellent (buy them on turn 3, forget about them, get 24 points) but cows are just as hard to get and simply don't pay off as well. The cow synergy space just isn't good enough to make cows profitable, to my mind. However, animals fit into lots of strong strategies, so it isn't a problem that some animals aren't that great.
The spots on the board are reorganized some and the new setup is much superior to the old one. The weak spaces got combined in useful ways so that nearly all the actions have a good use, but more importantly all of the strategies seem close to each other in strength. Most of our scores were in the 110-120 range, but we had people winning big twice in the 140-150 range and the big scores all looked quite different from one another.
I got the second highest score of our plays with a horse / shed / main board setup using weekly market spaces heavily, while the single highest score did it with a ton of exploration and raiding. It certaily seemed like there were many strategies that could work and navigating your way around the randomness and predicting other people's choices was critical. No matter the situation I always seemed to have several good choices open to me, and I really liked that.
The wildcard in the game is occupations. Some of them are really powerful and game defining. They regularly determine what path you should take, and that works as a mechanic. Unfortunately some of them are dramatically better than others, and it is clear that if you get a focused occupation and use it effectively you are going to flat out beat someone who got a terrible occupation. I think this hurts the game from a competitive standpoint but from a fun standpoint it isn't a problem. You just put out ten occupations onto the table and draft them among your players - everyone is going to get something powerful, you can make sure you don't overlap too much, and then everyone can have a blast playing their game.
You could use this drafting mechanic for a competitive game I suppose, but you would have to be willing to break from the rules as written.
In any case the game feels great and I love the theme. It does strike me as absurd to praise a game for theme when it involves covering 50% of Iceland with a single fur pelt, trying to figure out if there is room on Baffin island for a goblet, or getting extra beans because you threw a pig into a shed... and yet that doesn't seem to matter. The immersion is deep and I love playing, even if the rules are a bit of a headscratcher.
The real problems with A Feast for Odin are that it costs a ton and teaching people all the rules is a big barrier to entry. Once you are playing the game though, it is a beautiful thing.
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