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The Villagers Expansion Pack contains four small expansions for Villagers. These are Saints, Scoundrels, Profiteers and Developments. I’ll be looking at each one in turn before giving my overall impression of the box as a whole.
Saints
The Saints expansion is the smallest, and perhaps the least impactful. It adds five new special cards to the game: Benefactor, Nun, Pigeoneer, Prophet and Recruiter. One of these is dealt to each player at the start of the game and the rest are removed from the game.
Given how few components this expansion adds to the game, I would have expected them to be quite powerful. But in fact I found them a little underwhelming. In my first game with Saints, none of the three of us played our Saint card into our village. Not that they’re especially bad, reading the cards on their own they seem quite decent. But in a game like Villagers you have to cut off so many possible strategies; every play has an opportunity cost. And for me the Saint cards just never quite came to the level of being a noticeably better option than the other cards in my hand.
Scoundrels
Scoundrels adds nine special cards: Barbarian, Courier, Flaker, Noble, Schemer and two each of Sheriff and Thief. This one is almost two even smaller expansions put together. The Sheriffs and Thieves interact with each other and are shuffled into the deck before setting up the road. The rest are dealt out at the start of the game in the same way as the Saints. Each of these five gives you some way of messing with the road or taking villagers from other players. The Thieves take coins from another player during the build phase and the Sheriffs let you remove a Thief, giving you the stolen money.
Most of these cards seem a bit stronger than the Saints, in that most of them actively hinder an opponent as well as gaining you an advantage. That aspect of the Scoundrels is what makes this my least favourite of the expansions though. In my opinion Villagers is a game that benefits from its pleasant and friendly tone. You compete with your opponents for resources, but you don’t usually actively interfere with each other. (Yes, I remember about the Apprentice, but there are only two of them.) On top of that the whole theme is having your villagers work together and build on each others’ abilities. Individual cards taking resources directly from other players runs contrary to that theme. You may mind that less than I do, but in my opinion that thematic mismatch makes this the weakest expansion.
Profiteers
More cards are added again with the Profiteers. This time we have the Alchemist, the Arkwright, the Captain, the Carter, two Wholesalers and two Freelancers. All of these are shuffled in before setting up the road. The Wholesalers are solitary and have a silver symbol for each set of wood, ore and hay in your village. The Freelancer lets any player pay a coin for an additional build action. The rest have the new bronze symbol. This lets you score at the end of every build phase, not just during a market phase, although you can only score one bronze symbol per round.
This is my favourite of the expansions so far. None of the cards are single-use special villagers, so they will all end up in your village if you play them. The Alchemist, Arkwright and Carter are also each part of a production chain, rather than solitary or special villagers. This makes these cards feel much better integrated with the base game than either the Saints or Scoundrels. I also like what they add in terms of gameplay. The bronze-symbol cards provide a good way of getting extra money, keeping your supply ticking up throughout the game. Meanwhile the Freelancer lets you both improve your own village and earn gold from your opponents. All of this fits into the base game’s themes and mechanics much better than the Saints’ or Scoundrels’ single-use special cards.
Developments
While the other expansions add more cards to the mix, Developments perhaps adds most in terms of gameplay. It brings a new phase to the game – the development phase, which occurs after each build phase. At the start of the game the players randomly select one card from each of the developments decks. Then in the Development phase the player who wins the goal on each card takes the corresponding token and earns the associated bonus. These bonuses are mostly extra gold, but some of the cards also provide a builder or food symbol. These count as being in your village while you have the token. This makes the developments a useful extra part of your engine, and they can be quite powerful if you can consistently control one or more tokens.
The developments are a good addition to the game in my opinion. The cards are strong enough to add interesting options to the game. But they don’t hinder the feel of the original, and the additional phase passes quickly enough that it’s never a nuisance. Having four cards in each developments deck also adds some variety and replayability, as each combination of three developments will play slightly differently.
Overall
Looking at the expansion pack generally, it fits well with the base game. The charming aesthetics and diverse character art are still there and the cards themselves are still high quality. The development tokens are also pleasingly chunky. When cardboard tokens would have worked just as well, the tokens are a nice extra bit of tactility. Even better, you get a lovely chunky first player token to replace the original card.
Overall I think the Villagers Expansion pack is a good product. Getting four expansions in the box is nice because you can choose to play with any or all of them. And they’re each small and simple enough that playing with all of them is actually manageable. On the other hand, the box is cheap enough that you probably won’t feel short-changed if you only ever use two or three. They also don’t really change the game a huge amount. New strategies are opened up, but you can play with any combination of the expansions and it still feels like a game of Villagers. You might argue this means that none of the expansions has enough character of their own. But if what you want is just More Villagers, you get it with this expansion pack.
