#when it's somehow easier to reinvent the wheel than to just make wheels the normal way

[artificer-dice]

Anyone want to guess what I'm over-engineering today?

[playeroneplayertwo]

The Village Green Preservation Society (Village)

Over the past few years, Inka and Markus Brand have been on fire. The husband and wife designer duo have, in the past three years alone, released the lovely dice-placement racer Rajas of the Ganges (2017), come out with their own sprawling take on the legacy game in The Rise of Queensdale (2018), and played their part in changing the hobby forever with their remarkable Exit series (2016-?).

But if you roll back your calendar a few years, you’ll find a lovely gem of theirs about simpler times. Rather than escaping certain death in Exit or building a grand and majestic estate in Rajas of the Ganges, you are, well, just living your life. Train to be a wainwright or stableman, make your mark, live a long and hopefully productive life, perhaps join the city council or the church, and leave a legacy to be remembered in your small town forever.

Simpler times, indeed.

Village (2011) Designed by Inka & Markus Brand Art by Dennis Lohausen Published by Eggertspiele

Village is, at first glance, a fairly meat and potatoes euro about following four generations of your family through their simple lives in a small village. At its heart, this is a fairly straightforward resource management and conversion game. And yet, unlike so many similar games, there’s a little more than just picking up cubes and converting them into goods–although that’s certainly in the box, as well. Village is proof that the Brands’ inventiveness is no new thing. In addition to cubes, you’ve also got to grapple with time and its slow march forward. Every action takes time, and as time moves forward, those young’ns will grow, eventually becoming well-respected elders, continuing to age until they die and either become part of the village chronicles or are buried in the cemetery and are all but forgotten.

Lowdown (How to Play–in a Nutshell)

Before you ask: yes, it’s about points. Points, points, points.

Colored cubes and action selection combine to define Village. A certain amount of cubes are mixed randomly in a bag before being randomly distributed among a number of action spaces. On your turn, you will take a cube from a space, put it on your individual player board, and then you may take the action from that corresponding space. Each action will have a cost in time, and time is kept on a circular track on your player board.

The colored cubes will accumulate, and soon you will be cashing them in when you select an action in order to convert those cubes into different resources in the form of tokens. One color cube, however, is a plague cube, and if you choose (or are forced) to take a black action cube, you must advance time further.

The actions, which I’ll cover only briefly, are all similar variations on a theme–essentially resource conversion or selling items for points. You can take bags of grain in a harvest (another resource you can convert later or sell to market), grow your family (adding another meeple to your personal board), travel beyond the village (use wagons you’ve made to visit locations for bonuses), craft (cash in your cubes or grain to make wagons, plows, wagons, or buy/raise horses or cows), join the village council (points!), participate in church (points again!), and go to market to fulfill orders by selling your goods (the most points!).

In addition to simply trading in cubes to get other goods like plows or wagons, don’t forget you’ve got those meeples. You’ll often also deploy those meeples as family members to a particular location to make it easier to do that action in the future–essentially because you have trained them in that craft. The idea here is that the second time you need something, like a wagon, you’ll be able to go to your Auntie Edna or Uncle Pete, now trained as a wainwright, and get a wagon spending only time, rather than spending those precious cubes you’ve been hoarding.

When you’ve advanced your timekeeper far enough, however, one of your oldest generation-meeples must die. Slightly macabre, perhaps, but arguably realistic. Those family members will either take one of a few spaces in the village chronicles (for lots o’ points!), or be buried in the village graveyard (for no points!). After the village chronicle or graveyard is full, the game ends. Most points wins.

Tea for Two (Scaling for Two Players)

Each aspect of the games is scalable, with the village chronicle having fewer spaces for two players vs three or four, as well as fewer cubes and fewer market orders for fulfillment. In a two-player game, you’ll have a lower likelihood someone will take a cube you’ve been eyeing, but beyond more limited screwage–which is normal for a two player game vs a three or four player game–scaling is very good here, not really altering the experience at all.

Death to My Hometown (The Bad Stuff)

The mechanics here are very sturdy, albeit typical, euro fare. Take a cube, do an action. Take a cube, place a meeple. Take a cube, convert cubes for tokens. Take a cube, sell tokens. Rinse and repeat. This is a reliable game engine, built on an equally reliable chassis. Many of the actions feel comfortably familiar: harvesting for grain (take a resource) or the “family” action (put out another meeple from your supply), market day (sell for a variable market tile aka convert goods to points). About a half-dozen games immediately come to mind that rely on very comparable actions, and the reliance on cubes here abstracts these actions further, moreso than some of the others. The rulebook states (and I had to look this up because I don’t remember this at all) that orange cubes represent skill, green cubes persuasiveness, brown cubes faith, and pink cubes knowledge. I like that the cubes have some representative analog, but once you play, they completely lose any semblance of meaning beyond their color. A game like Clans of Caledonia (2017) has similar actions (build things, sell things), but feels infinitely less abstracted. Action-wise, Village is not reinventing any wheel.

The other hit Village will take is on the graphic design. A meat and potatoes euro game designed in 2011 looks–today, at least–very dated. It has all the attractive graphic design of a shag carpet and lava lamp. Ten years in board game graphic design is 30 years in fashion or interior design. Board Game graphic design still remains a vulnerable spot in the armor of a great many euro classics, and in that regard, Village is no different. Some publishers have learned a lot since 2011, but even today, Eggertspiel isn’t known for its flashy look. Village is a prime example of their perfectly utilitarian–if nothing to write home about–art and graphic design.

Local Hero (The Good Stuff)

I’d heard a lot about Village prior to playing it, and after reading the rules, I was a little confused about some of the more effusive praise that had been heaped on it. The mechanics are so… generic euro. After playing it, though, I realized something remarkable about it: Village is greater than the sum of its parts.

Being a person of slightly above average cynicism, perhaps, I find it rare to say that about a game. More often than not, I hear about a game and get excited–whether that’s because of the designer, mechanics, theme, art, or some combination of all–only to find the experience of playing it somehow less than the sum of its parts.

So why does Village succeed where other, more immediately engaging or interesting games ultimately fail?

For me, in a nutshell, it’s because of the time mechanic and the familial/generational development. Somehow, a game with a fairly bland and only moderately well-implemented generic euro theme (farming/working in a town/selling stuff, etc) manages to build a story as you play. The story I’m referring to is not actually in the game, mind you. This game does literally nothing to create a narrative for you. There aren’t even basic event cards, like This month there is a storm! Oh no! Better stock up on grain to sell so you don’t starve! Rather, somehow, a story manages to slowly and unassumingly coalesce for you as you play. Let’s say on your first turn you take a meeple and invest the time to train them as a stablehand, becoming skilled at raising horses and cows. You begin to sell your cows at market, and with cows, you’ll be well on your way to a much better harvest, because you’ll now be able to plow for more crops. With more grain, you can fulfill orders, or take those bags to the mill for money (aka points!). Or maybe you’ve got a barfly Uncle (with the expansion, Village: Inn (2013), at least). Maybe he was, over the years, able to buddy up, over a weekly shot and a beer perhaps, with the bigwig Count, guaranteeing that you’ll get more points at the game’s end if someone else in your family is able to visit him by traveling to his faraway castles! Excellent!

Oddly enough, this kind of thing is also present in other games. Giving a meeple a profession does not a story create. To put my finger on it, and I don’t want to sound maudlin, but for me it’s that death mechanic. I’m not exactly a softy, but is remarkably effective, to say nothing of affecting (although that’s may be a slightly-strong word). Your nameless meeples are bestowed with something akin to preciousness as you’re forced to usher them to the village chronicle, or more unfortunately, the graveyard.

Ultimately, there’s something ineffable about Village, something beyond the simple mechanics of it. There’s something remarkable here and worth exploring.

The End (Final Thoughts)

I was a bit flowerier than usual in The Good Stuff, because it’s hard for me to say what works so well about Village, but to turn back to gamier terms, there’s lots of great and satisfying strategy here. Lots of tactical decisions, lots of scrambling to meet objectives, errr I mean market orders. Lots of dilemmas, lots of time management–never enough time, btw–to say nothing of never enough of those dastardly cubes. There’s a lot to manage, but never so much that it becomes overwhelming. There’s new stuff here, but not enough to be daunting or difficult to manage, and it’s a game that is just welcoming enough to be taught to new-ish folks to the hobby. And the time, again, that time. For every first or second generation that you drag your feet to remove from the board, equally interesting is how you may, at times, rush these folks through their lives in hopes of sneaking them into the village’s chronicle before someone else.

So much of this game feels expected, but it’s surprising how much one little wrench can do to the works of a machine and ultimately defy all of your preconceptions. My first impression of the Brands was formed in playing Exit, which duly impressed me. Upon playing Village, however, I was delighted to learn that their seems to be no end to their ingenuity, and I will be keeping an eye out for anything that bears their name.

Player One Eric