Your Village People – Card Game Preview

Your Village People is a card game which boils down to the simple premise of playing card to either remove life points from other players, stop other players from removing your life points. There are card you can play that double your attack, there are even cards that you play that will bring you back from the dead if you do get knocked out. there are eleven different card type with various kinds of power on display that you’ll do your best to play to your advantage and win, or according to the creators, stop when you’re no longer having fun.

Players get four cards in their hand, and on your turn you’ll either play a card or draw a card from the deck. Though if that means you have more than four cards, you’ll need to play a card whether you want to or not. You chose which player you want the card to target and in turn they can play a counter card to defend any against your played action. You can keep countering each other until you run out of cards, which will happen more often than not. Play continues until the deck runs out and the player with the most lives left is declared the winner, or if one player manages to remove the lives of every other player. There are nods to Uno here or even Exploding Kittens, where you can send back attacks but Your Village People very much has its own individual identity.

Your Village People looks like a finished product, with a box that you would expect to see sitting at Target or Waterstones next to the The Mind, or Power Hungry Pets. The rulebook is well laid out a simple to understand, with suitable explanations for each of the cards you play with. The entire message behind the game is that you’re here to have fun, and this is reflected in the illustrations of the various cards. We’re looking at strong line art and colouring, with slight nods to recognisable characters alongside some harmless stereotypes, that all help to bring a great presence to the table. In a world where cards seem to be busy and loud and full of text, I appreciate the clean graphical design that focuses on the characters. Even the cat. Yes, there is a cat.

Play is relatively fast and you won’t expect a game to last more than ten to fifteen minutes at most, and again it will be down to whether you want to be playing something fast paced or chilled out. Overall there’s not a lot of tactics in Your Village people and you’ll rarely be trying to plan in advance. It is probably one of the gripes I have with the game as I don’t understand the four card hand came to be the de facto hand size. I’m not sure how it got passed so many playtests without an increase being considered. It leads to cards being played quickly and without too much choice, but I found too often that once you started to get into the game, you were more likely to be drawing cards on your turn than playing them, and if you didn’t the card you wanted, you were still playing a card regardless if you had gone over the five card hand size. It ended up a bit pedestrian in some games if the right cards didn’t come up, and a greater hand size would quite easily negate that potential problem.  It’s a shame as there’s the bones and foundation of a fun time filler that graces the table with a stylish and memorable presence.  I can see it sitting nicely alongside those who’ve picked up Power Hungry Pets, and are looking for something just as stylish without the need to learn and digest a huge rulebook.

You can find out more about the campaign  here