Just Kieron, James and David this week so we decided to try out Village as a 3-player game. The result was another entertaining game - it plays just as well with 3 as with 4.
After the last game, I'd thought that we'd missed out on earning points through converting food to gold via the Miller and then converting gold to points via the council, but found myself thwarted in my aim to try this as Kieron had the same idea and got in ahead of me. His 1st generation council leader ended up giving him a commanding lead. I prioritised creating new family members so that I could push the 2nd and 3rd generation members into useful positions in the church and council. James went exploring early and then fought with me for control of the church.
As we approached the end game the balance was very interesting. Kieron was ahead on visible points thanks to the council gold conversions. However he didn't want his 1st generation member to die so had only killed a couple of family members. James had burnt through his family at a tremendous rate, with David not far behind. Our scores were far behind Kieron, but we both had more in the chronicle and the church. James had also completed the travel section, so I felt completely out of the game. I was able to complete a triple market in the last turn just before Kieron killed off his 3rd family member to finish the game.
As we totaled the scores Kieron's lead evapourated. The effort he'd had to put into the gold into points scheme meant he had been forced to ignore too many other parts of the game. James had good scores everywhere and my last turn market gains made up for my incomplete exploration bonus.
Final score: James 73, David 72 (ouch), Kieron 59
Conclusions: Competing in the council and the exploration sections is difficult. However you can defer things (say spend a turn building loads of carts) ignoring the feeling that you must keep scoring points. Depending on 1st generation family members can cause problems - waiting and putting a generation 2 member into the council
would have meant that Kieron could have allowed more family members to go
into the chronicle.
A brilliant game - shame it only plays up to 4.
2 comments:
Oh and I forgot to mention that James won even though he'd invented a rule for himself that made the game more difficult!
Thanks - modesty would have prevented me mentioning it ;-)
I thought the bonus for 3 or 4 or 5 people in the chronicle meant in different parts of the chronicle, so for example I killed off a traveller really early to get the only green space and killed my councilman to get one of the two red spaces. But it just means that many people in total wherever they are.
This is a cracking game. We played it in under 2 hours too.
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