Look: Village of Legends and Ancient Guild Expansion
Designer: Lorenzo LupiPublisher: 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
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
