Village of Legends Review

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Quick Look: Village of Legends and Ancient Guild Expansion

Designer: Lorenzo Lupi 
Publisher: Self published 
Year Published: 2017 
No. of Players: 2–4 (2–6 with expansion) 
Ages: 10+ 
Playing Time: 20–60 minutes 

Find more info on BoardGameGeek.com

Review 
Village of Legends is a fantasy based combat/adventure deck building game. The base game, which came out in 2017, is designed to pit players against each other for the 2, 3 or 5 player games. For the 4 and 6 player games, you will play in teams. We had 3 players to play a game and then 2 of us played a couple of one-on-one games. The objective is to eliminate your opponent(s).

In Village of Legends, players take on the roles of heroes with their own special abilities. The base game has a barbarian, dwarf, elf, mage, paladin, and warrior. The Ancient Guild expansion includes a cleric and druid. We didn’t get all of them played, but missed only a couple.

The characters can also earn experience and advance two times to gain additional skills. These advancements in our 3-player game were influential in the final outcome. However, to gain experience you must be attacked by another player’s hireling. The purchase and use of hirelings becomes a part of your strategy. They can inflict damage on your opponent, but also allows them to become more skilled. 

The balance between the characters played well. It really showed with how the characters abilities matched up with the cards available in the Market, then were available in our hand. 

There are 6 different decks of cards to purchase from the Market to build your personal deck. Along with the Main deck, there are also Beers, Scrolls, Spells, Potions, and Nuggets decks. The differences in the Market decks allow players to create strategies based on the characters. The smaller 5 decks provide specific components to every game because of their size and limited variability. The Main deck is more random because of its size and contains weapons, hirelings, protections, and treasures. We didn’t exhaust the main deck in any of the games we played. 

Each of our games were different in how they played out. What cards were available to purchase, and how those cards came up in the personal deck, provided combinations that were great for the player at some points, and dreadfully dangerous (like me picking up five money cards and no weapons while being attacked by hirelings) at other times.

The randomness of the decks with the ability to play different characters allowed for easy back-to-back play. 

Setup 
Setup was easy. Each player starts with the same 10 starting cards. Then you build the market by shuffling the 6 different decks and show what’s for sale. Like most deck building games, if the cards are sorted at the end of the game, the next one is a quick start. 

Gameplay 
Game start is slightly different depending on the number of people playing. In the 2 and 3 player games the first player begins with 3 instead of 5 cards, as does the second player in a 3 player game. 

Attacking another player means you are going against the player to your left, which leads to a strategy of attacking left and defending right. This isn’t always the case as some spells allow for the attack to go against any player. There are also times when you must first attack another player’s hirelings or get through their defenses.

The Market at the start of our first game

Once we were playing the game, the combat was easy to follow. The explanations were easy to understand, but allowed for play to be more complex. That is because some of the cards have secondary abilities. The abilities allow you to alter the Market, draw extra cards, discard, or even remove cards in your hands from the game.

Theme and Mechanics 
Village of Legends is a fantasy based game. You are an adventurer fighting other adventurers. To do that, you are collecting treasure and buying stuff to use. It all comes down to what’s available in the Market when you can buy, then what’s available when you need it. 

Artwork and Components 
Lorenzo Lupi created the art for his game. This gives everything a look and a feel that flow together. Everything we played fits easily into one box that could be easily carried to a friend’s house or on a short trip. 

The Good

• Rule book available in 6 languages
• Easy to learn
• Multiple strategy paths
• The limited availability of cards means you may have to make alterations to your strategy

The Bad

• The limited availability of cards can create advantage and disadvantage for specific characters (we had one game that went quickly because the cards favored one character over the other)

Final Thoughts 
Village of Legends was an easy game to learn. The use of a Market to bring different cards into play at different times throughout the game was a nice difference instead of knowing what was available from beginning to end.

The speed of setup and play allows Village of Legends to be a good game while waiting for the larger group to show up.

Lorenzo Lupi has designed an expansion to allow cooperative play that at the time of this review is on a Kickstarter funding campaign. I would have like to see how the cooperative expansion worked and played. 

Players Who Like

• Deck building
• Fantasy based gaming
• Player versus player combat games

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Check out Village of Legends on:

          

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Daniel Yocom - Reviewer

Daniel Yocom does geeky things by night because his day job won’t let him. This dates back to the 1960s through games, books, movies, and stranger things better shared in small groups. He’s written hundreds of articles about these topics for his own blog, other websites, and magazines along with stories, after extensive research. His research includes attending conventions, sharing on panels and presentations, and road-tripping with his wife. Join in the geeky fun at guildmastergaming@blogspot.com.

See Daniel's reviews HERE.