The Strange Phenomena of Year Walking

It’s time to reveal one more of our dirty little secrets – Maybe the biggest one yet!
We’ve been asked a lot about what the word Year Walk actually means. So here we go; a short summary of the strange phenomena of year walking.

Årsgång, or Year Walk as we quite literally have chosen to translate it, is an ancient Swedish custom on which our fourth game is based. Its purpose was to see what would happen the following year. The folklore surrounding the phenomena varies widely regionally.

Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, during the night.
Almost all variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room. One was not allowed to talk to anyone or have anything to eat or drink. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. This was not an easy task as strange and dangerous creatures roamed the night. These creatures would of course include a lot of the mythical creatures from the Scandinavian folk lore.

If the walker reached the church alive, he had to walk around it in a specific pattern (again, these patterns differ widely) and the future would be revealed to him. This already unusual practice became very uncommon in the 19th century and vanished completely in the early 20th century.

As you can understand, this game has taken a lot more time in research and story development than we are used to. These two subjects are something that we will tell you more about very soon!

We hope that this has made it all a little more clear to you now – and that you’ll be looking forward to go on our variation of year walk…