Village of Legends

Village of Legends

A while back we came across Village of Legends. After seeing the art on the cards, we were already excited. This is a fantasy deck building game, and as we did not have many deck building games in our collection, we were happy we got the chance from Lorenzo Lupi to try it out. Yes, you read that correctly, Lorenzo so far as we understand did most things himself with Village of Legends. We were impressed and excited to start our journey with his game.

How to Play.

The set up in Village of Legends is really easy. Place the market board in the middle of the table and separate the following cards from the main stack: coins cards, staffs, spell cards, scroll cards, beer cards, potion cards and nuggets. Each player will get two staffs and eight coins to shuffle it and create a player deck from it, the remaining coins and staffs can return to the box. Shuffle the other cards you separated, and place them on the designated top market spaces, reveal the top card from each deck. The remaining cards will form the main deck. Shuffle the main deck and place it next to the market, reveal five cards face up on the market. Each player can choose one hero (male or female side) or select one at random. Place one red cube at your maximum HP and your experience token on zero. You are ready to begin.

In Village of Legends, you will be able to grow your hero into a mighty Legend. Your goal is to be the last man standing and defeat all your opponents. The first player will start with three cards from their deck, the second with four and all the other players with five. If you are in a two player game, the first player draws three cards, the second player five.
During your turn, you can choose to play all the cards in your hand, any unused cards, will still be discarded at the end of your turn. At the end of your turn, you draw five cards from your deck again. If you have no cards left, reshuffle your discard pile.

In the beginning you can only buy cards from the market, sell an item, or attack, since you only have coins and staffs. One coin cards, gives you ten coins to spend on the market. To buy a new card for your deck, simply spend the amount of coins (or nuggets/treasures) that is indicated on the bottom right corner of the card you wish to buy, and place it in your discard pile. If you want to sell an item, look at the same value in the bottom right corner. If the value has a golden background, you can sell it, otherwise it will stay in your deck. If you sell an item from your hand, you get half of the value to spend in this turn and the card will be removed from the game. If you don’t spend all the money you just gained, it will be lost. You can also attack a player. To do this, you play the weapons/spells from your hand and attack the player you choose. Roll a die and check the bonus next to the card to see what damage you do to that player. If you have a monster in front of you, placed there by another player or a sneak attack. You first have to attack that monster. Each monster has an amount of hearts in the bottom left corner. If you don’t defeat it, it will attack you every time at the beginning of your turn. The attack value and amount of hearts is found at the bottom of the monster card. Once you defeat a monster, you gain the market value in experience, and the monster is discarded to it’s owner. Note that if you have a monster in front of you, it will also block you from buying anything from the market.
You can use all the weapon cards in your hand to damage monsters or players, but you can only play one heavy weapon or attack spell on your turn. Another difference with heavy weapons is, if you break a defense from a player, the remaining damage you would do will go straight to that player. This doesn’t happen with normal weapons.

You can also play defense items or spells. If a player would attack you, they would have to break the defense item or spell first, it will then be discarded to your discard pile. Place a defense item in front of you to show that it’s active, you can have one defense item of each kind at the same time. To play a spell, weather it’s an attack, defense or healing spell, you have to have intelligence. On your player board you can see how many intelligence you start with each round. You can add or lose intelligence by playing scrolls or drinking beer for example. If you have defeated enough monsters, your experience token will go to level two or three. Once you reach yellow on your experience track, your hero is level two, level three is light blue. On your hero card you can read the bonus your hero will receive for reaching that level. Every time a card is bought from the market, a new card is immediately revealed from the main deck. Sometimes this will reveal a kobold with a sneak attack. This monster will attack the drawing player with the normal attack rules instead of being placed on the market. If you don’t defeat a kobold before the end of your turn, or if you already have another kobold with sneak attack in front of you, the kobold will move to the player off your left. Once a Kobold is defeated, you gain experience normally and the card will be removed from the game.

Village of Legends also has a multiplayer mode with teams or allies depending on the amount of players. The rules of the multiplayer mode are simple and easy to learn. They can be found on the back of the rulebook.

Playthrough of the game.

We like Village of Legends a lot! The fun already starts with picking a character. Lorenzo took the time to create a male and female character for each race in the game. In reality, this means you have twelve heroes with great art to choose from in the base instead of six. There are no differences in maximum health or hero abilities between the male or female version of a race. This game also has a lot of replayability because of the characters. Each character has it’s own quality’s and the game will be very different with each opponent you play against. But because you reveal random cards from the main deck, the items of the market will vary with each game to.

It’s also not a long game as a game with two player only takes 20 minutes and a game with four players between 30 to 60 minutes. We also found that because you can choose so many cards from the market at the same time, you are really in charge of creating a deck that will fit your hero. Village of Legends is a little luck based, since you throw a die for almost every card you play to determine how strong the card will be, but we found this fits the game naturally and creates a nice flow of the game. It can create that tense moment where you want to buy that one special heavy weapon to crush your opponent with, and you just need one good throw for that chest you play in order to be able to pay for it. Or maybe you can defeat an enemy with a die of six. It was really fun to watch with tension how strong cards will be from either you or other players, as your fate depends on it.

Final thoughts.

Village of Legends is a quick easy to learn deck building game with a nice theme and awesome art. It has a lot of replayability and a lot of heroes to choose. It is also really easy to take this game with you as it comes in a small box. Lorenzo Lupi has really thought of everything while creating this game. If you like deck building fantasy games, we found that this is a really good addition in your collection.