The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville

• Designers: Christian Kudahl, Erik Andersson Sunden 
• Publisher: Ravensuburger
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4o9mttf 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The village of Buttonville is undoubtedly the most glorious village of all time aside from one small problem: There’s no one there!  In The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville, you slip into the role of a guild master and recruit new residents — quirky inventors, cunning traders, and fearless guards — to transform the sleepy little town into a place full of life and laurel wreaths.

Each round, you take two cards, whether directly from the market or blindly from the deck. Once you’ve gathered enough like-minded people, you lay down a set: three gossiping bards grant a song of power sounds, while four nimble blacksmiths provide a discount boost for additional recruits. Your sets provide instant effects, enhance each other, and ultimately yield victory points. Timing, a knack for probability, and a touch of luck with the cards are the key to your triumph.

What’s special about these cards? The synergies grow like ivy: the larger a set, the stronger its effect. Should you spontaneously play three identical cards or eagerly wait for the fourth? Add to that the modular market system, which sets up each game differently. Thanks to 25 different villagers, no game will be the same. Grab the guild flag now, recruit your troops, and secure the glory Buttonville deserves!

To start, select the villagers that you want to play with – you will use nine different villagers, 4 from the yellow Citizens group, and then one each from the Nobles, Automatons, Artists, Magicians and Tradespeople groups.  Each of these stacks should have 12 identical cards in it. Shuffle them all together to make a single deck.  Once shuffled, use the start player marker to set aside a particular portion at the bottom of the deck – it may help to turn the cards above perpendicularly so that it’s clear to see where the split point is. 

Each player gets a hand of 4 cards from the main deck as well as 2 buttons.  A market is made of 5 cards from the deck.  

On a turn, the player must first recruit two villagers, this can be either a face up card from the market or the top card from the deck.  If the Market has less than 5 cards after a draw, refill the Market to 5 from the main deck.  

After drawing, the player may optionally play a set of cards from their hand.  Place the set in a column in your display.  Note that you never combine this set with any previously played ones.   All the cards in the set must be of the same villager.  In general, the set of cards will have a single effect, and the strength of the effect is related to the number of cards (X) played in that set.   

At the end of your turn, make sure you have seven cards or fewer in your hand, discard down to 7 if necessary.  Then check your play area, if you have multiple sets of the same villager, keep the largest set and discard the other.

Play continues until the main deck is exhausted; finish the current round and then play one more full round. You can use the portion set aside in setup to complete the current round and the final round.  If the deck is exhausted, all players who cannot draw a card receive a button in compensation.

Now, each player scores their sets: 1/3/5/7/10/13/17 for 1/2/3/4/5/6/7+ cards in a set.  Additionally, players score one point per button they have collected.   The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most sets.

My thoughts on the game

The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville (called Buttonville from here on out) is a fun little card game that evokes feelings of Dominion and other deck builders – but in fact really has no deck building at all!  The deck-building-ness of the game comes in the modular setup where you choose a subset of mini-decks from the large selection in the box.  Then, once you’ve seen which cards are in play, you have to synthesize the possible combinations of special card actions to develop your ideal strategy.

Of course, unlike most deck builders, you are a bit more subject to luck of the draw here.  When you add cards to your hand, you cannot simply choose from the whole supply but rather you have to take what is available in the market.

Each of the characters in Buttonville has a different action and you will be challenged to figure out the best time to play each one.  One important catch here is that you can only have one set of a character at any time.  So… if you want to use the action of a character multiple times, you’ll continually be replacing the set of that character – making it much harder for you to build a large set.  You generally want larger sets in your play area because you store much higher point values for larger sets than smaller ones.

That being said, it may be worth it to sacrifice the score for a particular type of card if you get more benefit from taking its action over and over.

Individual turns move quickly, and 3 and 4p games end up taking about the same amount of time because the deck size is the same.  You’ll have more player turns in a 3p game than a 4p game, and that’s a useful thing to remember.  It’s harder to have a long term strategy in a 4p game when you simply don’t have as many turns to put the plan into motion!

There are also some interesting hand management aspects in the game.  You’re limited to only having 7 cards in your hand at once, so if you’re trying for a mega-play where you plop down all 7 cards of the same type, you’re going to have to figure out how to make smaller plays as you collect you huge set.  (Alternatively, if there are cards which have actions that allow you to add to existing sets, you can then work on building up a large set in piecemeal).

As I said, the games play out quickly here, and it’s been the sort of game that usually has people clamoring for another play immediately after – of course, including changing out some/all of the cards.  It’s been a huge hit around here, and as of the turn of the year, this is my personal front runner for Spiel Des Jahres come the summer.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y
• I like it.
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4o9mttf