Villagers Board Game Review

The setting of this card drafting and tableau-building game has...

Read more...

The part where you send brigands out onto the road to kidnap desperate people and enslave them . . . that didn't work for me as much.

Kidding! Everybody is smiling on the cards, so clearly they're having a good time contributing to the local economy. Milk maids gonna milk.

And fair enough. Not that anyone cares, but just after the first big blast of the plague in the 1340s there were about 20% of all French villages (and other parts of the world too though I don't know the percentage for them) that simply disappeared because they lost key people necessary to make any town a going concern. Blacksmiths in particular, which served the purpose of engineer and stone masons as well, became very valuable individuals that could not be done without.

The result is abandoned villages you can still stumble across in the woods of France today that had what remained of their population simply walk away when they became unviable.

Villagers is really not my kind of game. It seems to do what it does well, which is provide a very thin structure where the rules get filled in as cards come out onto the table. There's a solid hierarchy. The result is that the game is a bit different every time you play it, based on the combination of cards that are out. Given my less than ideal eyesight for this kind of game I find I'm simply not willing to put the effort in to play well. I don't want to be a bother looking at everything over and over again, because the game state just doesn't seem to sink in to my brain. I can open my vision and look at 120 chits on a map and identify where my attention should be, but in games like this where each detail matters it seems I need to reassess everything every time it's my turn. Don't know why.

One of my buddies introduced this and he clearly loves it. I think it's a pretty clear example of our different taste in games. He asked me what I thought and I told him it works well, but it's just not my kind of play.

Thank you for your comment, Sagrilarus. Yes, I think Villagers won't be for everyone. It's just the right sort of level for me - not too hard, not too basic.