OUR REVIEW

Life needs a pub, too

Village Inn

Beer, INN and Brewery

Inka and Markus Brand, who have been showing their talent for inventing games as a designer duo, did prove two years ago with their game „Village – Wie das Leben so spielt“, that they also have a lot of talent for strategic games. This their game won Deutscher Spielepreis 2012 and was also selected „Kennerspiel des Jahres“, in the same year. So, not surprisingly, very soon there was a big demand for expansions to this award-winning game.

After a "long" waiting period the first expansion for this game was published in spring of 2013, „Village Inn“. The expansion can only be played together with the core game and expands this game for a fifth player and with new possibilities for actions. The expansions contains individual boards for cemetery and the village chronicle allow you to play the basic game with five players without having to add the expansion to the game. If you play it like that the rules stay entirely the same with the exception of number and distribution of the influence pieces at the start of the round.

If you play with the new action possibilities of Village Inn, the flow of the game changes as follows:

There are four new customer tiles for the market action. Those tiles are shuffled together with those of the basic game and are available for purchasing. Besides other commodities you pay for them with the new commodity "Beer", which you acquire by resolving an action in the "Brewery".

The Brewery, in analogy to the Office from the core game, is a craft building featuring a yellow coat-of-arms, and it also works in the same way as other crafts buildings. To use it you take an influence cube from the yellow stock on the board and have then two possibilities to use the action for this building: You either place one of your villagers onto the building and pay a total of 6 time units for two commodity tiles "Beer" or you discard three bags of grain for two beer tiles. The beer acquired in this way can be spent at the market to buy customer tiles or in the newly installed "Inn".

The Inn is the second new building on the board, which, contrary to the Brewery, features its own color-marked action area. This action area is filled in each round with influence cubes, as usual, and is governed by the same rules as all other action areas, but with the exception that a villager is compulsory for it, who is placed on the building as usual after the education costs have been paid for with time units. To implement the action then costs an additional time unit and allows you to do two things:

First you must choose one of three open-faced stacks of 10 character cards each and put the top card to the bottom of the stack, thus revealing a new character. Then

You can choose again one of the three stacks and buy the top card on one of them. Each of the cards has a price of one gold or one or two units of Beer and either grants the player a unique one-time action bonus, for instance taking of certain commodity tiles, or new conditions for scoring victory points at the end of the game, for instance, the "Mayor" grants you two victory points each for up to three green influence cubes on your own farmyard.

The buying and taking of a character card reveals the next card in the stack and thus for the next action in the inn three characters are again available. All in all there are up to 30 different characters which can be acquired in this building in the course of the game. But you must remember, that for persons who die in the Inn there is no room in the village chronicle. They are placed on a free slot on the cemetery board and do not score points at the end of the game.

Those simple new additional rule and the rest of the expansion integrate seamlessly into the core game, also due to the felicitous graphic design of the expansion. And yet Village Inn, without doubt, has been intended for players who already have some experience with the core game and want to have more of the same.

For all those who try Village for the first time - they will not be overwhelmed by the rather short and simple rules of the expansion, and yet the new character cards, due to their many and varied effects, present challenges to all players to find the best ways how to use them and the optimum timing of playing them, which are not easy to master in a first game.

So, with this in mind, you should have played a few games with the core game alone and liked to play it, before you approach the expansion. All those players who are already familiar with the possibilities of the village and how to use them to best advantage will definitely get their money's worth.

Not only do the new villager cards introduce an important tactical component into the otherwise very static character of the game and thus provide an improved replay value, they also demand - due to their supportive effects - also new considerations and approached to the individual action. None of the cards seem to be - in relation to their cost - out-of-proportionally strong or weak, on the contrary, it seems to matter when and if the card is revealed in the Inn. And this then introduces a rather small element of chance.

As my conclusion I can whole-heartedly recommend this expansion to every player who enjoyed the core game and who would like to test the game's possibilities further. The expansion offers enough novelty on existing strategies, also provides a better balance for those strategies and introduces interesting new approaches for extra points which might decide the game. And this exactly what makes Village Inn a good expansion, which I will use with the core game in all my future plays of Village.

Dennis Rappel

Players: 2-5

Age: 12+

Time: 90+

Designer: Inka and Markus Brand

Artist: Dennis Lohausen  

Price: ca. 20 Euro

Publisher: eggert / Pegasus 2013

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: Worker placement

Users: For experts

Version: de

Rules: de en es fr nl

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Attractive design

Topic supplements the core game nicely

New and improved opportunities for victory points

Display and combination of villager cards governed by chance

Compares to:

Worker Placement Spiele, e.g. Agricola or Caylus

Other editions:

Tasty Minstrel Games, Ludonova, Gigamic, 999 Games

My rating: 6

Dennis Rappel

What might be missing in the core game as regards to tactical element and some variation is made up for by Village in with its 30 different villager cards. These cards not only supplement the actions from the core game with further opportunities for victory points, but also create new ways to acquire these points.

Chance (pink): 0

Tactic (turquoise): 0

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 0

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0