I got to play Village last night. It’s one of those games that you’ve probably seen in every games shop and its at the “not a bad price but, is it any good” price range.
I played Blood Royale at Knavecon some years back and LOVED the family generations mechanic. The game lasted over several generations and your heirs took over the reins of power and so on. Village features something similar, simpler but no less fun
If you’re a worker placement fan you’ll be in worker hog heaven. It’s classic stuff with a few twists that make it very enjoyable.
You start the game with your own shiny farm and a family of four (first generation) on the outskirts of the eponymous village. Your four meeples can stay down on the farm and help with the harvest, go to the village and specialise in certain skills/buildings getting you an extra bite of the cherry from the actions available there or go travel the world and return trinkets and more importantly score
The village has a number of spots with a limited few colored resource cubes on them which you can pull to operate that particular building. The buildings allow you to buy economic motors like oxen, wagons, horses and scrolls. Other buildings allow you to enter some of your meeples into the church (scoring), politics (turn order), kick off a market (allow you to flog resources for points) and so on. There’s a good half dozen plus
Resources can be used for a few things like sending one of your meeples off to travel the world and bringing back resources and points. Used for getting ahead in politics and the church hierarchy and paying for some of the actions in the buildings.
So far this is all run of the mill (pardon the pun) stuff, but what makes it very interesting is the time resource
Each of your meeples starts with a big one on them (first generation). Marriage allows you to add new meeples to your pack (second gen) however on the flip side some actions or pushing the envelope uses up time and every ten or so time used will see one of your oldest generation kick the bucket and be interred (if there’s room) in the book of remembrance (scored at end of the game).
It’s a stupendous mechanic, lifting just another worker placement into something way more interesting. You find yourself agonizing over taking a good move but loosing one your older meeples in return. Like all good games it’s a case of making the best worst choices or at least hoping you have.
This game reminds me a bit of Constonapolis. There’s a lot of bang here for your buck and despite being tired from playing other games I found myself getting more and more into this game as it progressed. This is a fine fine game.
If I could find fault, I found it hard to figure out where everyone was score wise mid game. You can get an idea but no more. When the game was over there was a considerable difference in scores. In my case I sat watching the others zoom way ahead of me on the scoring track. I was ok with that. I had a lot of fun with this game and I’m eager to play it again
Nice game. Well worth a look
Huzzah
Vic
Victor Gannon Games 