Welcome to rock-paper-scissors-CROSSBOW!
Village Pillage is an addition to the growing collection of games that is marketed as being for a wide array of possible player counts, but doesn't play equally well over all of them. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Village Pillage is a light, medieval-themed game running on "advanced" rock-paper-scissors mechanics. Everyone starts out with one each of the four categories of cards: Farmer, Wall, Raider, Merchant. Each class is identified by its color (green, blue, red, and yellow, respectively). You'll get more cards as the game progresses, but each connects to one of those four colors. Each card has different effects depending on what the opponent plays against it; most cards have some kind of effect against all four card types, but some (e.g. Raiders) don't. If the Raider is played against the Farmer or Merchant, for example, she steals four turnips (money) from the opponent, which is very powerful; however, against a Wall or another Raider, she gets nothing, which is the risk.
Each turn, players play two cards, one against each neighbor. Then they'll generally collect some turnips, based on the abilities of their cards. The goal is to buy three relics, which cost 8, 9, and 10 turnips (less in a smaller game). Some abilities let you put turnips in a personal bank so they can't be stolen, but even that maxes out at five, so the more turnips you have vulnerable, the more dangerous thieves are. And red cards act near the end of the action order, so if your green or blue cards brought in a bunch of turnips, they can be stolen the very same turn. This makes raiders a threat from the start, and gauging when your opponents will use them is a big part of succeeding in the game.
After each round, players reset their hands and have all their cards to choose from, with a few exceptions that keep a card out for one round. Players can add to their options, generally through Merchant-class cards, for minimal or sometimes no cost. In theory, this could function somewhat like a deck-builder, where you construct a turnip engine that gets you all kinds of cold, red cash, but in reality the game ends too quickly. That's fine; it's light, it's supposed to be short, you get it over with and it's all good.
The issue is when the game grows to larger player sizes. I understand that offering a six-player expansion is a great sales tactics, but it borks the game. The reason is that someone is going to get a lead, and the number of players impacts how things play out after that happens.
- With two or three players, everyone interacts with everyone else every round. If someone gets ahead, the other(s) can pick cards directly against that person with an eye towards reducing their lead.
- With four players, there's only one player each person doesn't impact. You might end up with an awkward situation where two people across from each other pop off and the two in the middle are stuck trying to stop them both while also catching up, which can suck. However, if one person gets a lead, two people can try to stop them, and they only have to watch one other player who might try to take advantage of that.
- With five and six players, if someone gets ahead, only two people can stop them, and there are multiple others who can safely build (or steal) their way to the top if the initial leader is thwarted.
In all cases, if the initial leader doesn't get stopped—and because the game is so short, there is a point where they can play pretty safely and have little chance of losing—they're going to run away with the win. But in larger games, unless the turnip levels stay fairly balanced (which is harder with more people), someone's going to end up in a situation where they need to stop the leader while not being able to impact the rest of the table enough to catch up themselves.
It's light, it's fun, just don't play it with more than four people unless you're a group that doesn't care much at all about who wins at games. (Is that a thing? I don't understand this thing.)
Score: Seven moldering turnips out of ten.
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