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Overview: Each player controls several generations of a family in a 1700s-era village, but in addition to managing workers and resources, players must also consider time. In Village, the actions you take with your workers are important, but the legacy they leave when they are lost to time may have the greatest impact of all.
Players: 2-4
Ages: 12 and up
Playing Time: 75-90 minutes
Retail: $49.95
Rating: Enjoyable and refreshing. If the future of Euro-style boardgames is innovative twists on a proven formula, then this is it.
Who Will Like It? Fans of European-style strategy games looking for a new experience without having to go overboard with complexity.
Theme:
On the surface, Village is a fairly straightforward worker placement game, but its theme becomes apparent when that game is iterated over four generations of workers. Village has a few standard options for gathering points: buy and sell goods, travel to other villages or move up the ranks in politics or religion (for a price).
Each of these actions cause the passage of some amount of time, though, and once your time marker has progressed completely around the track, a worker from the oldest generation is lost. At that point, the worker will either gain recognition for the job they were doing at the time (see the Village Chronicle below), or if all the spots for that job have already been occupied with previously-lost workers, they will be unceremoniously placed in a grave.
Players will score points at the end of the game based on how many of their workers make it into the Chronicle, so there is a thematic balancing act wherein workers must choose either recognition for themselves or a less important job that provides a greater benefit to future generations.
Components:
In Village, each player gets their own personal time track, a few resources in the form of cardboard tokens and wooden cubes, and their collection of workers spanning the four generations. To denote which generation a worker is a member of, each meeple is numbered. The downside is that you'll have to apply all of these numbers by hand using a provided sheet of stickers.
Minor annoyances aside, the actual component quality is solid all around, with the best feature being the artwork. This is one of those games that you can guarantee will turn a few heads and garner a few questions if you're playing it out in public or at a gamer gathering. Between the smattering of brightly-colored cubes and meeples, and the beautifully-realized drawing of a village that ties all of the worker placement spaces together, Village is an eye-catching game.
Gameplay:
The passage of time and eventual death of your workers was already described above, and while that is the major unique twist of Village, there are a few other aspects of the gameplay worth mentioning. The first is the random seeding of all worker spaces with a small pile of cubes (of which there are five different possible colors). In order to place a worker on a given space, a player must first claim one of its available cubes. Often, these cubes are needed to trigger the effects of spaces, but the black cubes actually count against you. Once there are no more cubes left on a space, it is filled and cannot accept any more workers this turn.
This means that when deciding to place a worker, a player must take all of the following into account:
- The effect that the space triggers
- The amount of time it will cost to use that space (bringing another worker closer to death)
- The available cubes to choose from when using that space
- The likelihood that leaving a worker at that space will gain them recognition in the Village Chronicle if it happens to be their last move before death.
All of that can be a lot to bear, which gives skilled players the opportunity to take a lead. However, the decisions become simpler as the number of cubes on the board dwindles, keeping the game's length and complexity from getting out of hand. The game does not end until either the Village Chronicle or Graveyard are filled, meaning you'll likely go through all of the cubes on the board and re-seed it a few times.
All of the workers space effects are also very straightforward, with the exception of one: the chapel. Workers placed here are kept in a black bag until the end of each round (when all cubes are taken). When that time comes, four monks (dummy workers) will be added to the bag, and a random draw of four workers will decide which will be allowed to enter the chapel track this turn. Alternatively, players can pay off the church to guarantee that their workers are selected. Lastly, once a worker is on the chapel track, they can pay tithing to the church in the form of resources, allowing them to move up the track, score some instant points and the earn the chance of an end-game bonus.
Conclusion:
For all of the complexity that was described above, Village actually plays surprisingly smoothly once every player gets the rules down. Part of this is due to the fact that Village is extremely tactical rather than being dominated by major strategies. The random distribution of cubes across the action spaces has a huge impact on determining optimal moves, giving the game a fair amount of replay value as well. Many spaces require a payment of specific cube colors to trigger the space's ability, so Village requires some forethought within each turn to see where those cubes can first be acquired.
It's often said that major board gaming innovations come around once every five years. The last time this industry was shaken up was with the introduction of deck-building by Dominion back in 2008. We're due for another big splash, and I've gone out on a limb in the past to say I believe it will be the introduction of unique (and potentially thematic) mechanics to the now-commonplace worker placement Euro framework. The time mechanic in Village was first out of the gate in this regard, and that earned Village the 2012 Kennerspiel des Jahres award as a result. In the meantime, new titles such as T'Zolkin: The Mayan Calendar and the upcoming Via Appia have continued adding new wrinkles to the Euro game formula.
Village is already a great game and nothing can change that, but if board gamers are treated to a second golden age of the Euro, I'm pretty confident that Village will be viewed in an increasingly favorable light for many years to come. I highly recommend giving it a play.
Wired: Aging mechanic is unique among worker placement games. Random cube and chapel worker drawing adds just the right amount of luck.
Tired: Stickers! Time mechanic and worker death can create a steep learning curve for players with no prior worker placement experience.
Disclaimer: Tasty Minstrel Games provided Disclosure: GeekDad received a review copy of this game.
