Villagers (Revised Edition)
Villagers is a beautifully illustrated medium to light weight game of card drafting and tableau building for 1-5 players, and is the 7th most backed UK Kickstarter campaign of all time! You are the founder of a new village during the middle ages, in the years after a great plague. The roads are full of refugees seeking a new beginning. They come to you, hoping to settle down on your land and make a living. Your grain farm is the ideal starting point for a village, reliably providing food for many people. You must choose wisely who you allow to settle with you, as your food and resources are limited. The people on the road have valuable and unique skills, but they all in turn rely on other people with very specific crafts to be able to work. Raw materials, tools and services must be provided by other people from the road. If you manage to find people that can work together to make a profit, while increasing your food surplus and capacity for building new houses, your village will be prosperous.
Designed and beautifully illustrated by Haakon Gaarder, Villagers is a game of card drafting and village building set somewhere very much like medieval Europe. As a village founder you'll invite people from all walks of life to live and work in your expanding community. If you can recruit the right people to form lucrative production chains while balancing your food production and building capacity, your village will become the most prosperous and you'll win the game!
In solo mode, a lone village must prosper against the machinations of the very ill-tempered Countess.
Basic villagers - the backbone of any good village!
No money was exchanged for any of our reviews.
If you'd like to see the work-in-progress rulebook, you'll find it here.
Tom aka Slickerdrips plays through a two player game:
Villagers is played over several rounds, each with two (or sometimes three) phases.
In the draft phase, players take it in turn to take villager cards from the face-up or face-down cards of the central road area. Whenever someone takes a face-up card, it is immediately replaced from the leftmost stack of face-down cards. The number of villagers a player can take in the draft phase depends on how much food their village produces.
In the build phase, each player places villagers from their hand into their village - putting them to work. You can play as many cards as you have builders in your village.
There are two market cards, tucked away under the second and sixth stacks of face-down cards on the road. When a market card is revealed, there will be a market phase this round, right after the build phase.
During the market phase, players count up the total amount of gold produced by the people working in their village. At the end of the second market phase, the player with the most gold in their supply wins the game.
As you can see, Villagers is quite simple, but it's not that simple, there's some other stuff going on, so let's talk about...
Each villager is part of a production chain. Villagers must be placed in the correct order in their production chains. Longer production chains give you more resources, but require more draft and build actions to put into play.
Some villagers need special tools or equipment to start working, and they have padlocks on them. Padlocks must be unlocked by paying the bank, or a villager of the type specified - called the unlocker - 2 gold. If possible, this gold is paid direct to the unlocker, and the coins remain on their card for the rest of the game, scoring extra gold during each market phase. This interaction makes it possible to profit from what other players are doing.
A silver coin icon indicates that some villagers score a conditional amount of gold at the end of the game. They offer many extra scoring opportunities, and you can play two of the same to double your bonus!
Special villagers can make a big difference. Some are like wild cards, helping you create your production chains, while others can create scoring opportunities, or help you in the draft phase.
In solo mode, a lone village must stand against the evil Countess, an AI opponent who seeks to restore her former glory at any cost. The early rounds take place in Summer, but fair weather does little to lull the fury of the Countess. And when Winter comes, she really loses her temper...