Villagers Review

“If we build it, they will come.”

“But we need them to come so we can build it.”

“Good point. If we make some delicious food, they will come, and then we’ll build it.”

“Do you know anyone who can make ‘delicious’ food?”

“I do a pretty decent Spaghetti bolognese?”

“...”

Game: Villagers

Designer: Haakon Gaarder

Publisher: Sinister Fish Games

Artist: Haakon Gaarder

Player Count: 1 - 5

Run Time: 30 - 60 mins

This review first appeared on the Polyhedron Collider website, but if you didn’t catch it there you can enjoy it here now.



The plague has run rampant across the land, devastating and ruining lives in its wake, but we humans are nothing but resilient, and so we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and begin again. This is where you start, at the very beginning, you’ve found a suitable patch of land to build upon, and so construction can get underway. As people flee their old lives, or search out a better way to scratch out their livings they come across your blossoming village. If they have the right stuff you’ll offer them food and lodgings in return for their contribution to the greater good (the greater good).

Villagers is a smooth, uncomplicated engine builder. Your goal is simple; become the most prosperous village, achieved by attracting the most skilled and industrious villagers who in turn will generate the most gold. You need to not only feed and house them but you’ve got to be able to supply them with the materials and tools they need to do their job also. Not forgetting that you need to draft them into your own personal pool of villagers before any of your neighbours do so; which is the first phase of the game:



Players draft villagers in turn from a central ‘market row’ or is this game the Road, where there will be 6 face-up cards and 6 face-down stacks; I like to think of this as the face-up cards being those who are close enough to be able to identify, and those that are a little further away so you know roughly their trade. These six stacks also represent the general populace of the land, and the game ends once they have all been emptied. At the bottom of the second and the final stack is the Market Round, which is where you inhabitants will sell their wares and make the all-important, game-winning gold.



There are 10 different types or suits of villagers, ranging from Ore to Lumber to Grapes. You’ll draft as many villages up to the amount of food your fledgeling settlement produces, food being one of the two basic resources you’ll need to manage.

The build phase is where you’ll take those drafted villagers up into your hand and start adding them to the village proper. Naturally, this is also limited, this time by the number of builders you have. In short, to get people into your village you need food, then before they can start contributing to the village they need a house. Simple.

Now, to the nuts and bolts of you engine building village: it’s all based upon simple supply chains, to do G you F, which needs E, but if you had D then E is free, D obviously needs C, and if you have B then you’ll make more from G, but that also requires A. Which is very typical of this type of game, what Villagers does though is it takes this pseudo-algebraic nonsense and distills it in to a very accessible, very intuitive setting of 14th Century Europe…ish.

In the above gibberish what I really want is a Wine Trader – because on Market day the Wine Trader rakes in a pretty decent amount of gold, but before he can sell his wares a Vintner must first make it, and a Graper has to gather the choice grapes before that. But the Wine Trader also needs bottles from the Glass Blower, and the Vintner also needs barrels from the Cooper….and so on.



Villagers tricks you into believing you only have two resources to worry about; Food and Buildings, and that with its cute minimalist artwork style it’s a simple game. Whereas what you actually have is essentially two little engine builders that overlap one another creating rich, if not occasionally crippling decisions each turn. Each villager is a resource in themselves, providing a service or goods for anywhere between 1 and 10 other villagers (indicated by the keychain symbol). This includes neighbouring villages, meaning if you don’t have the required villager, but your opponent does, you have to pay them.



It isn’t always the largest village that prospers, it’s the most economical, and there are multiple ways to achieve this. A few of the direct supply chains end in very high-value cards, such as the Jeweller and Tailor, but an Ore Muler, Log Rafter, or Freemason can dish out plenty gold based upon who else is in your village during the final Market Round. Also, by just having those root villagers that everyone else will need you can gain a huge income from the other players like the Blacksmith and Carpenter.

Villagers does exactly what is said on the box, it’s a game about people building villages. You’re not juggling the raw materials that make a village; laying down roads and building up houses, your only concern is the people who will do this. You’ll be crafting a complex web of individuals, probably across other villages and players, to achieve your goals. Each card played branches out creating a new route and a new possibility. Above all Villagers presents a great engine builder but with a very accessible, and easily understandable theme, the links and chains between any two cards just makes sense.



I’ve walked away from this game each time thinking that I could have done it better, I could have built it more efficiently and I convince myself that next time I will. If you want to know more, or if this has been enough to convince you to get involved you can back this project on Kickstarter right now!

Disclaimer:

This review was based on a prototype version of the game provided by the publisher, as such the final version may differ from what is seen here.

7 Wonders Duel

Game Name:	7 Wonders Duel	Published Year:	2015
Game Publisher:	Repos Productions	Player Scale:	2
Game Designers:	Antoine Bauza & Bruno Cathala	Run Time:	30 – 60 mins

7 Wonders Duel takes you back three–thousand odd years or so, to once again rule over an empire in this tricky, thought provoking, and ultimately brilliant riff on its big brother; 7 Wonders. If you have never played 7 Wonders don’t panic, as these games are very different, yet are clearly related.  If you’ve played 7 Wonders, and, love it or hate it, this game is worth investigating.  A relatively small footprint, and gameplay under an hour it is great for couples, lunch breaks or just as a cracking head-to-head game that wraps up in under an hour.



After each selecting four of the available wonders each – yes that does mean there will be eight of them in total, but only seven can be built – and your starting coins, in turn, you will select one the available cards from the pyramid style display and add it to you civilisation, paying any costs associated and thus gain its benefits/resource.

There are three ages to the game, where each subsequent Age the range of resources changes and evolves, advancing your civilisation forward.  The game will come to a natural close at the end of the Third Age, where all points are calculated and a winner is declared.  Alternatively, victory can be achieved through a ‘Scientific’ channel – collecting six of the seven possible scientific icons, or via the ‘Military’ route, whereby you crush your opponent beneath sandal shod foot.  These latter two are much harder to achieve – but believe me, it feels really, really good when you do.

 

[caption id="attachment_1873" align="alignnone" width="4032"] Pyramid of the 1st Age[/caption]

 

A central feature of the game, and one that makes the game look very different from many, is the table layout of the cards for each of the Ages.  Not only does it look cool, and it is also pretty thematic but it provides a great assimilation of the drafting mechanic used in 7 Wonders, but for two players.  Which is far, far better than the two player mode that exists in that game.  From this very simple set-up, each player is beset by an array of choices and consequences, in a greater fashion that you would normally experience in a draft.  With about 50% open information – since roughly half of the cards are placed face down – the questions of what to take, what to leave behind, what to open, or leave for your opponent to open form your basic, yet difficult choices that must be made each turn.

[gallery ids="1875,1874" type="rectangular"]

When playing this game, there is a definite sense of flow, with the game’s pace charging ahead as the Ages fall, as your civilisation becomes more coherent and more structured, choices become more clear, but never simpler.  Ways and means of blocking your opponent become more recognisable, but ultimately more costly if they don’t also benefit you.  If you fall into the category of a “Classic Gamer”, one who likes strategically planning ahead, second guessing your opponent and basically planning your victory from four or five moves away, 7 Wonders Duel will be right up your street, with a nice flourish – in that every now and then, a revealed card scuppers even your best laid plan.  On the flip side of this though, if you are prone to Analysis Paralysis this game can, for those same reasons feel a little daunting at times.

 

[caption id="attachment_1880" align="alignnone" width="4032"] 8 of the 7 Wonders...erm...yeah, 8[/caption]

 

Players already familiar with 7 Wonders will feel right at home playing this game, coming armed to the table with an understanding of how the tableau and resource building works.  There is a significant change in the way Commerce, Science, and Military are handled, but not so much so to create a barrier.  New players to this cannon will quickly be able to make sense of the rule book, which provides plenty of examples plays for the more ‘complex’ rules.  The rulebook, isn’t the most concise, and looking for rule clarity and reminders isn’t always as straightforward as one would like – I always forget how many coins you start with during set up, and I also forget I have to go to page six to find out.  Of particular note is the iconography, particularly on some of the Science tokens, Guides and Wonders – once you know what they mean the symbols do “make sense” but that meaning doesn’t spring forth, so early games can become slowed while you look them up.



With an almost perfect and useful box insert, quality components including the nifty military tracker, Repos Productions have done exactly what you would expect of a major game distributor.  Unfortunately, they have even managed to make the card sizes irritating again – in 7 Wonders they are unnecessarily big, in Duel, too small – yes it helps keeps the footprint down, but if a standard poker card size had been used very little would have been lost.

There are no ‘Take That’ actions you can make in this game, no way you can directly stop or hamper your opponent, other than removing or limiting their options (a couple of the Wonders do allow you to destroy one of your opponents resources).  Military actions do provide a little back and forth, but never enough that you ever feel like you are focussing solely on that aspect of the game, and certainly not enough to spoil anyone's enjoyment.  All the player interaction happens above the table; one player out-smarting, out-manoeuvring and out-playing the other. The tit-for-tat of selecting the card you know you opponent needs soon becomes too costly, and so as the game progresses so too must a player’s ability to plan and strategize.



After a game of 7 Wonders Duel, I feel compelled to play it again, and again.  Throughout each game there is a palpable competition and conflict, and far more so than one would expect from such a small, compact box.  Some iconography feels obtuse, and the cards are a little too small for me to be able to comfortably shuffle, but really, these are the only bad points about the game...in fact, I wish I could play a multiplayer version of Duel, that wasn’t 7 Wonders.

It plays in under an hour, is a great two-player game with enough depth, strategy and variation to ensure each game will feel and play differently.  It also looks both interesting and beautiful on the table. 7 Wonders Duel, really does feel like it pits you head-to-head, in an all-out rivalry against your opponent in a way that many larger games just don’t seem to capture.  I strongly believe everybody needs a solid two-player game in their collection, and you can’t go far wrong with this game at all.

 

The Good:

Compelling game play

Great pacing

Strong competition

Thought provoking

Multiple paths to victory

 

The Bad:

Cards are too small for “man hands”

Icons can be very confusing

Rulebook is a little on the naff side

Can only be played two-player!

Don't just take my word for it though, check out what Meeple Like Us or Creaking Shelves have to say about this game.