 Villages the game you might have seen it where there's a bunch of graveyards and you basically put peasants out to work in the fields I'm mad at me thematically this game is incredible This game had the best like mechanic theme Synergy that I've seen in a long-ass time yep Peasants it was a field to do work and then the plague comes and kills some of them and they go into graves right so Basically, there's a village you are a family of people who work and live in the village sort of like a greek But you're you know right your it's a more of a shared space than a curricula right then you know right and on your turn You sort of you know you put your guys out there to work the different places in the village It's like oh you go visit church you go work in the craftsman's workshop You go traveling around to other villages and see what's there you go try to you know grow in politics Maybe become the mayor or some shit right you tell your go farm We need food go to the marketplace and sell some shit. We got shit We got to sell right we just made some shit. Let's sell it and you tell your people what to do But over time your family gets fucking old because they're old as you know, and you make babies of course and plague Yeah, but this plague and people get old and die So when they die they sort of if they're awesome enough They go into the history book of the village to be remembered by the villagers for you know And there's actually a little book and you put the dead people into the book And if they if the book is full then they go to unmarked graves unmarked graves or if they're not worthy of being in the book Yeah They go on unmarked graves now the game has a sort of economy Kind of like a Grickland all these other games where you're placing workers. They're getting cubes You're spending those cubes in other places to do stuff You've got a bunch of places you can level people up each of the areas of the game is really well self-contained really well explained makes sense The game's just kind of simple after you actually play it Yeah, basically when you put your workers out each space you can put a worker has cubes allotted there And when you put a worker you get a cube So what'll happen is a place will have like an orange cube and a black cube So it's like oh, I put my guy here. I do the action for that space I take the orange cube now only one more person can go there this round if they go there They must take the black cubes bad, which is a bad. It's a plague cube It's not a useful cube like the orange one. So it's like you sort of have to decide well I want a pink cube, but I don't want to do the action that the where the pink cubes are right now I want to do the action where the orange cubes are so it forces you to make some you know slightly tricky normal board game Decision now interestingly you have to keep going till all the cubes get picked up So eventually it's all black cubes and people are like ah well You also sort of want to take the black cubes, right? It's not necessarily bad to have your people die off because then you can get into the book first That is a way of scoring points and the legitimate strategy also I think the game ends when the book fills now that is actually a problem I had with the game's theme the game in the way It's mechanically set up you feel like you want to delay and avoid death that yeah I wanted the less you die the more people you have on the board doing things the more time You have to spend actions collecting victory points from the board But if people die sooner you get more victory points by being more prominent Well-known ancestors in the history of the village So how do you balance that this person if they keep working can get five more points? But if they die now, I can get four points now thus Blocking someone if I do that the game on your turn like you can spend actions You move this clock around and someone dies every time it goes around The problem is that all the mechanics of the game feel like you're avoiding death But intentionally spending actions to kill your your guys is a huge part of the strategy Mm-hmm a huge part I was regularly intentionally trying to die as fast as possible Well beat Scott into the graveyard early in the game I was trying not to die because I basically wanted to get a set up Yeah, and I said fuck that die die die and I basically picked you know I was like which part of the game should I I was like I'm gonna focus on getting points from like a single source because they It's one of those games where if you keep focusing on one area you get more and more stuff from that area Yeah, there's very it doesn't encourage diversification like a curriculum encourages specification There's very little reason to diversify and you're pretty much punished for doing it right So it's like I basically did the bare minimum in every place and I maximized traveling Why did I choose traveling? I didn't calculate how much points things are worth and you know Which area would be the best to specialize in I? Philosophically like the theme of traveling like yeah get out of this peasant-ass village and make something up Yeah, I saw you go in there and I ignored that entire part of the game which made it easy I almost maxed it out. Yeah, and I counted and I realized if you had maxed it out It wouldn't account for even half the points. I would get just doing the trading yet You were doing the marketplace which I could have specialized in as well and the marketplace way more points way better than Freaking traveling also. I max out the church. I did some church. You tried the church I'd also I did more town hall also I ignored the town hall mostly town hall was pretty good actually, but yeah, if I played it again I would basically fight for the friggin workshops and the marketplace and fuck and only do the other shit also Keep in mind the workplace and the workshops and the marketplace sort of grease the wheels of everything else So if you focus on those doing the other things becomes a little bit easier Yeah, like if you have wagons from doing all that shit It's just way easier to travel because you have wagons the games fun And I would actually recommend it for most board game people I know I don't want to buy it and I don't really want to play it again because it feels too simple I feel like if I play one of those lower level board games like in the settlers level and it's like we personally have moved beyond that But if you're still down there in settlers land where like settlers is a good game for you I think this might actually be a better intro to Eurogame This is a better intro to games like Calis this goes in between I think Carcassonne and Calis like you play Carcassonne you play settlers You don't you're not ready to jump to Calis Puerto Rico You village goes right in the middle perfect game for the people are at that level of Eurogaming, you know It's it's clean. It's fun. The theme is amazing with the dead people And also like here's an example that get it like the game limits you like you can go get grain But you can only get so much but you can buy a thing that'll let you get more grain and the game does not punish You heavily for not being crazily optimized like in a Grigola if you fuck up with your food you're fucked It's true and this game fucking up is not nearly as directly bad. Yeah It's like what's the worst you can do some of your people die sooner like a guy who would have been useful who was maybe You're maybe a guy was hanging out in a workshop He was living there and he was gonna help you produce wagons really fast But he died because he was the oldest person and you accidentally had to take plague cubes because you miscalculated Okay, now he's in the craftsmanship book and he got a lot of points But it's like send a guy to get some grain you've got some grain now You can you can get two grain at a time you can only hold five anyway So it limits the amount of calculation you need to do for moderately successful Directional heuristics yep and a lot of times there just aren't that many choices because as the cubes disappear It's like okay, you have to put a guy you have one you have a guy You can put him either in the traveling or in the church I guess it's the church. Okay, you know a lot of simple decisions is not a lot of tough decisions like a Gricola has so yeah Super fun, but I probably won't ever play it again except maybe in flight company if someone else bust it out Yeah, it's just sort you know fun sort of simple, you know, I wouldn't like seek it out I wouldn't pull it out of a library, but it's cute Not bad not you know not like I wouldn't avoid it like I would say innovation or a skyline No or ground floor ground floor skylines the dice one which is also man, but ground floor was awful This has been geek nights with rim and Scott special thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes Discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one But four different shows sci-tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays and my comic Wednesdays and indiscriminate Thursdays Geek nights is distributed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience But unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night