Village

I'm down with a nasty case of tonsillitis and most of my day I just roll around in bed, hurting everywhere and sweating like I was on a treadmill. First couple days I couldn't do much but now when the antibiotics have started to work, I decided it would be nice to write something about the game I bought last year since in my current condition I can't bake anything.

I hadn't heard about Village before I stumbled upon it in an online shop. The description said it won several GOTY awards and BGG claimed it put a twist on the worker placement scheme that I like. So, I was quite looking forward to trying out something new, unfortunately Village didn't turn out the way I expected.

After spending about an hour sticking numbers on countless figures and skimming the rules, I was ready to play the game. But with whom? My parents didn't like the complexity of the rules, my friends weren't exactly thrilled about its theme. It wasn't until about a month later that I played the game for the first time. And I have to say I was less than happy about my latest purchase. Village seems to me as a game that tries too hard to re-invent the worker placement genre, or better to approach it from a different angle, that it just ended up being quite unpolished around the edges.

A new game: Village

Last week I decided to act on an impulse and buy a new boardgame. I checked a list of nicely rated new-ish games and compared it to the offers of several e-shops that have their stone branches here in Prague.

Village or Kronika Panství (The Chronicle of a Domain as it could be translated) is German this year's Game of the Year. It looks like a standard  worker placement game but in fact it is not.

Each player has a family and each round chooses what actions to take from a selection of places around the eponymous village. Some actions need a member put on them, some don't. Players collect little cubes standing for different kinds of influence that need to be spent for performing certain actions. Most of the actions need also "time" spent on them which eventually makes one of the family members die of old age.

Ultimately, each player strives to make their family be remembered the most - place their deceased members in the village's chronicle and the younger ones to attain importance for the village in a church (as monks) or a town hall (as local politicians or something).

I've played it once so far. I will write a proper post once I get to enjoy it more.

A Game of Thrones

This franchise is all the rage nowadays. The books are bestselling, the TV show is universally loved and there is even a board game that has found its way to me. When I first played it, I hadn’t read the book (and so far I still have to read any of them) and hadn’t seen the show. The only thing I knew was that there are medieval families that are fighting over a throne and that there are dragons in it somewhere. I gave it a go with a group of friends who knew what was going on and kept quoting phrases that I didn‘t understand. Well, I thought, at least I can focus on the game itself and abstract from the theme, look into the design.

Agricola

My first encounter with Agricola was few years back on one of our annual board game sessions at our cottage. Some people in the back were playing it, I quickly glanced in their direction and was told that the game is fun but it's long and has sheep in it. That sparked my interest (I like sheep, I think they're funny), however I didn't play it.  Fast-forward to last year's April 26th when I bought the game. It was on sale in an internet shop, I had the money and BoardGameGeek ranks it as the third best game in their list.

In Agricola you play as a head of a family taking care of a farm in Europe of the 16th century. You have a small house for you and your spouse and a large lot to expand. Each member of the family is capable of performing one action during a turn and next to a choice of default actions at the beginning, a new action is added every turn.

Carcassonne

I see Carcassonne as a good entry game into the whole board game business. It's simple, yet quite complex, it doesn't take too long, yet there is a good deal of strategy present. Unfortunately it took a turn similar to the Settlers of Catan and Talisman - the core game was expanded by many and many expansions and while some actually enhance the gameplay, some just crumble the core into a nonsense (I'm looking at you, Princess and Dragon).

The goal is to have the most points at the end of the game. You achieve that by expanding an area around the starting tile by adding another tiles. You can only add a tile in a fashion that it graphically connects with the already-laid tiles and doesn't clash with any neighbouring tile. The tiles have four different features on them, but not always they have all 4 of them present. There are roads, meadows, city and monastery, and connecting them to each other always somehow yields points.