Tiny Towns: Villagers

• Designers: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood
• Publisher: AEG
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 12+
• Time: 45-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4ahS86Z
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Tiny Towns: Villagers, word has spread far and wide of a thriving little civilization in the forest. Creatures with incredible talents – from engineers to merchants – have come to visit these towns and decide where they will make their new homes. They offer the most astute town mayors their skills, which can transform buildings, control the influx of resources, and perform impressive architectural feats. The world of Tiny Towns is getting a bit bigger! 

Tiny Towns: Villagers is an expansion to the 2019 release, Tiny Towns.  In short, you are the mayor of a tiny town in the forest in which the smaller creatures of the woods have created a civilization hidden away from predators. This new land is small and the resources are scarce, so you take what you can get and never say no to building materials. Cleverly plan and construct a thriving town, and don’t let it fill up with wasted resources! Whoever builds the most prosperous tiny town wins!  In Tiny Towns, your town is represented by a 4×4 grid on which you will place resource cubes in specific layouts to construct buildings. Each building scores victory points (VPs) in a unique way. When no player can place any more resources or construct any buildings, the game ends, and any squares without a building are worth -1 VP. The player with the most VP wins!

If you are unfamiliar with the game, you can read access our review here: 

https://opinionatedgamers.com/2019/06/16/tiny-towns-game-review-by-brandon-kempf/

All of the base rules of Tiny Towns apply when you add in the expansion.   You do get a bunch of new building and monument cards – and these can simply be shuffled into the base game decks.  Each player also gets a Lodge card and 3 villager tokens (they look like cute little animals – the hedgehog is totally my favorite).  The three villager tokens are placed on any three corner spaces of your board at the start.  There are also two small decks of Villager Action cards; one of each deck is chosen at random for the game.  Each of these cards has special abilities that can be performed by your employed Villagers.

The game takes the same basic form – the round leader chooses a color cube for everyone to draw, and then that cube is placed.  If you place a cube on a space with a Villager on it – one of three things happens:

1) no building is built – the Villager must be moved to an orthogonally adjacent empty space. If nothing adjacent is available, then it moves to the Lodge card.  At the end of the round, it is then placed on your board on an empty space

2) a building is built, and it is placed on the space where your Villager is – the Villager stays on the board and is now considered to be working in that Village.

3) a building is built, but the building is not placed on the Villager’s space – in this case, the villager simply doesn’t move.

A space with only a Villager on it is considered Empty for the times that it matters.  If a building is placed onto a Villager’s space (not constructed with cubes), the Villager does not go to work in that building, and it must be moved to an empty space.

At any point later in the game, you can remove 1 or more employed Villagers from your board to use the special actions found on the Villager Action cards (cost stated on the card). Examples are:

Renovate – remove one building from your board and replace it with a building of a different type

Cutting Costs – Finish construction of a building with one fewer cube than usual

The game ends in the same way.

My thoughts on the game

The Villagers add in a bit of depth to the game as the Villager Action cards offer some powerful actions to be taken each game.  It can be a bit of a challenge to correctly predict which space will be the final space used to complete a building – as this is the only way to get your Villager employed.

You might even be tempted to alter your strategy on building just to get your Villagers into buildings – but you should only do so if you have a plan for what to do with the Villager actions.  If you don’t use the special actions, you’ll just be wasting your energy.  It’s honestly possible to just ignore the Villagers if you don’t think that the actions will help you that much.

Most of the building cards add variety but don’t necessarily use the Villagers.  I feel like those cards can just be left in the decks to help give you more permutations in setup.   The lodge cards are really not overly necessary, but they do give each player a pictorial reference for the three things that you can do with the Villagers.

Overall, I feel like this is a seamless addition to the base game.  At best, it gives you a few more options to consider in your strategy.  That being said, when they are included in the game, these additions are not overwhelming – and in fact, I have seen people win without ever using the Villager actions.

If you like Tiny Towns, the Villagers will let you experience the game with a bit more variety and complexity without much rules overhead.  I’m probably leaving these cards in my game decks at all times.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson: I’ll strongly second Dale’s note that you need to be careful about over-focusing on getting the villagers to generate their actions if you don’t actually need those actions.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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

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