OUR REVIEW

LIVE AND LET DIE

Village

CHRONICLE OF Life

Village, a game designed by the team of Inka and Markus Brand, having been published in 2011 by eggertspiele and Pegasus Spiele, and being distinguished by receiving the award of Kennerspiel des Jahres 2012! High time to take a closer look at this game!

The designers have published a number of games already in different genres, among them other „expert games“ at eggertspiele: Guatemala Café and Im Schutze der Burg (A Castle for All Seasons).

Village without doubt belongs into that genre, too. This can be concluded by a first glance on the prettily laid out and well arranged rulebook, which, after all, comprises 12 pages.

At first glance the board frightens one bit due to a lot of pictograms, but already after a first read-through of the rules they reveal themselves of being of great help and the board is still well arranged.

As regards to topic Village at first glance looks a lot like one more of those many medieval economics simulations. But this impression is deceptive! Village is a lot more innovative than it seems!

In Village players write the history of their extended family and its members who try to leave a lasting impression in their village across several generations. In order to to so family members take up varied professions, like craftsman, politician or clergyman, try to advance their career and - this is the pivoting point - try to die on time, but more on this later. The winner, anyway, will be who could acquire most Prestige points for his family.

The game is played in rounds, in which you first load the seven action squares with a pre-set number of influence cubes which are randomly drawn from a bag. Those influence stones come in five different colors.

Then players have their individual turns, the starting player goes first. In a turn you choose and implement an action of a kind for which there is still an influence cube available, and take any influence cube from the action square.  

Available actions are:

ñ Family
This gives you a new family member for your farmyard.

ñ Grain Harvest
Choosing this action gives you two bags of grain; if you already own horse or plough tiles or even oxen and plough tiles you receive three or four bags of grain, respectively. A condition for this is that minimum one family member is still present on the farmyard.

ñ Crafts
Here you can acquire horse, oxen, plough, scrolls, wagons and coins. Basically there are two ways to pay for these goods, either with time or with influence cubes or bags of grains, respectively. In case of grain or influence cubes you simply discard the corresponding resources. Paying with time, on the other hand, requires that you take one of your own family members from your farmyard onto the corresponding building, invest the necessary time to train it and then invest time again to produce the corresponding good. When you already have a man there you save the cost for training. Implication of paying with time will be explained later in this review.

ñ Market
At the market you can sell goods, especially those produced by crafts, for prestige points.

ñ Travel

ñ This can be used to send family members from your farmyard on trips to faraway cities and villages. This costs time, wagon tiles and various influence cubes and earns you different forms of awards, especially prestige points.

ñ Council chamber
Here you can place a family member at the cost of time and scroll tiles or of green influence cubes (green represents Persuasiveness) to advance his career as a council member, which can result in various privileges and prestige. Among other things the starting player advantage is assigned here.

ñ Church
Here you can add family members to the black bag, which is paid for again by time or brown influence cubes (brown represents Faith). The black bag is important when there is a call for church service attendance.

As soon as a player has taken the last influence cube off an action spot and has implemented the corresponding action the round ends with a church service.

In this church service you draw four pieces from the black bag. In the normal course of the game this is done blindly and thus randomly. But players have the chance to influence their luck by donating money.

The pieces that were drawn from the bag are chosen to advance on the career ladder in church. Players can let advance their family members by discarding grain bags. When this has been done a scoring happens in which the ranks and numbers of family members are taken into consideration and the best represented family is awarded two prestige points.

This so far constitutes a rough overview on the various actions and possibilities to acquire prestige. But I have left out one very important option, that is, the option of letting your family members die. In this option time, which has been mentioned a few times already, plays a role. Each player has a life time track for his family, which is mainly made up from spots arranged in a circle. Whenever you use time for payment, the marker must be advanced on the track as many steps as necessary. Whenever the marker completes a full circle a member of the oldest generation still in play dies, the pieces are marked for generations.

When there is still room in the village chronicle in the chapter corresponding to the profession of the deceased, he is immortalized there and earns prestige for his family. If the chapter is full the deceased ends up on the graveyard of the unimportant, in peace but insignificant. Entries into the chronicle and graveyard availability govern the end of the game, too.

I think that you already have gleaned from this description that there are many ways to prestige in Village. Accordingly there is variety of strategies that can be tried out. I am not sure yet if the balancing is perfect, but at least, after the few games I was able to put in so far, there were no clear peculiarities, which can be taken for a good sign. All that I know so far is that it is no use at all to try to be active in all areas of the game. So at the start of each game the question is: What do I do? Let them die early and in masses? But then you should provide progeny early and on time and careers in church or council chamber could end too early to yield lots of prestige. Travel? In that case you should try to visit all cities which takes up a lot of resources and limits your options of selling at the market. Victory of defeat is definitely also co-decided by your dear fellow players, because if you travel alone or trade alone at the market surely has more of a walk over than in case of company there. At any case, the number of options is limited! All in all a game just made for me!

To all those who cannot be frightened away by a somewhat longish explanation of the rules and a duration of more than the 1-hour-limit and like to toil over decisions on which action should best be taken first, I can wholeheartedly recommend Village. It least in the medium term Village should keep us interested. If it will appear on our gaming tables regularly in five or ten years I cannot assess at this time. In any case, I think it is a worthy award winner in the category of Kennerspiel des Jahres.

Markus Wawra

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 90+

Designer: Inka und Markus Brand

Art: Dennis Lohausen

Price: ca. 35 Euro

Publisher: eggertspiele / Pegasus 2011

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: Development game

Users: For experts

Version: de

Rules: bg cz de en es fr it nl pl sk

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Clear structure

Many strategic and tactical possibilities

Lots of interaction due to taking away actions

Compares to:

Development games with choice of action, e.g. Agricola, Caylus …

Other editions:

Descendance, Gigamic, France; Het Dorp, 999 Games, Netherlands; La Villa, Ludonova, Spain, Fantasmagoria, Bulgaria; Kronika panmstvi, Albi, Czech Republic;  Tasty Minstrel Games, USA; Uplay.it Edizione, Italy, Hobbity, Poland; Albi, Slovakia

My rating: 6

Markus Wawra:

I love games which let my try many different strategies and where I must think closely in each turn what would be the best tactical move, so Village is exactly right for me. And then there is the nice idea, albeit somewhat macabre, to let your people die strategically, that is, early! If the game will be really long-lived will be also determined by the balancing of the strategies, but at the moment it is too early to tell!

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0