Villagers Preview

You are the founder of a new village in the Middle Ages, in the wake of a great plague. With scarce resources, you need to choose wisely which of the refugees you will select from the road to settle with you. You need to build up a population of villagers who rely on each other’s specific skills and crafts and provide each other with food and the ability to build new houses, which will in turn increase the capacity of your village and make you prosperous.

Villagers was funded in a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign by, UK-based company, Sinister Fish Games. Both the game design and artwork are from Norwegian designer Haakon Gaarder and it feel as though you can really see some inspiration in the art from the middle ages in Scandinavia.

The Gameplay

Villagers is a card drafting and village building game for 1-5 players in which each player will form their own tableau of Villagers, building an engine of resource and gold generation. Each round in Villagers consists of two phases; a drafting phase followed by a building phase. In the drafting phase you’ll take a number of cards from the central pool related to the amount of food in your village. Once all players have drafted cards, there is then the chance to build cards, and the number of cards you build can also be increased by putting the right cards in your village with the building symbols.

Throughout the game you’ll build single villagers, but you’ll also start to build trees of visitors, where playing one card relies on having already played its predecessor. Other cards will be locked and you may need to pay an opponent to play the card. These ‘tech trees’ give a real focus to the game and unlock bigger and bigger abilities to generate large benefits or lots of gold that will ultimately be your end game points.