I am not a number!

Thursday games

Carcassonne meeples, or followers Català: Els meeples o figuretes de fusta popularitzades pel Carcassonne. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Full house this week as all the gang arrived, bearing games, which was nice. Having recently decided that six was not an ideal number for games sometimes, but that it would be reasonably easy to split into two threes or a group of two and one of four, we put this to the test. Crabro and ProfMudlark decided to play Conflict of Heroes together on a smaller table, while the rest of us set up Village on the usual big table.

I hadn't been aware of Village, a 2011 design by Inka and Markus Brand, but it proved to be a very good Euro of the worker-placement type, which is a mechanism I like very much.

mrwendell proved to be a very able teacher: patient and methodical. The rules fell into place quite easily... The strategy was a different matter however.

One of the things about the game which sets it apart from worker-placement games in my own collection is the death of the workers. Each of the meeples has a little number on its chest denoting their generation, with those of generation 1 passing to glory before those with a 2 and so on to 4. This makes things interesting, as the acquisition of some useful items and achievements involve the passage of time. Do you try to keep your meeps alive or kill them as quickly as possible to ensure points for a noble death? A certain number of these ex-meeples will be immortalised and contribute bonus points at the end of the game while others will simply lie worthlessly and ignominiously in the church yard. Thus it becomes of some significance not just when your little peasants snuff it but where. This passage of time and its consequences lift the game for me from being just another worker-placement Euro.

It does have some down-sides though. It seems that it is long, although, like my first game of Princes of Machu Picchu, it did not feel so when I was playing it because I was so engrossed - Indeed when I looked at my watch in the closing stages I was amazed to see the whole evening gone. No doubt this would speed up in future games, a learning game always being significantly longer, however, it didn't feel like a 90 minute game, at least for four players.


The other problem may be illustrated in how far ahead MaOldie was at the end. Ma had opted for an aggressive market strategy and it seems that there isn't really a counter-strategy for the other players, let alone multiple strategies. This would be disappointing if true and I have since heard the game described as "broken" for this very reason. It would seem that all the players have no choice but to compete strongly in the market to avoid these run-away wins. It did later turn out that we had one rule wrong which may have marginally affected this, in that we had laid the future market tiles face up giving Ma a chance to prepare in advance for coming market requirements.

I enjoyed my first play anyway, coming a solid last but with the knowledge that one correct decision on cube colour in the next to last turn would have put me five points further forward and into third. No doubt mrwendell could say something similar though. Petra Pan put up the best challenge to Ma but she was away in the seventies or eighties with a clear gap to Petra and a similar one back to where I languished in the thirties.

I hope we can give this another try sometime and that, if we do, we will be more competition for MaOldie...