Lost in Translation

Each year, a group of German board game critics award several "Spiel des Jahres" awards (or Game of the Year awards) to the types of games my friends and I love to play. As of recently, they have added two special subcategories: the "Kennerspiel des Jahres" and the "Kinderspiel des Jahres."

For those not fluent in German, it's very important to note the difference here.

My friend was curious to see what "kids' game" earned the 2012 top prize, and ordered the KENNERspiel award winner, Village. What he wanted was the KINDERspiel winner, because "Kennerspiel" translates roughly as "Connoisseur-Enthusiast Game." It's fortunate that we like more sophisticated games, because it quickly became apparent during the explanation of the rules that this was no kids' game. (Unless they have some freakishly smart kids in Germany.)

Village divides a game board into a number of different sections, each one with a unique action a player can take on his turn. But these actions are limited by the number of cubes placed in the section at the start of a round; to take an action, you must remove a cube from the area and add it to your resources. The cubes are also color-coded, which informs another key part of the strategy -- some actions ask for payment in certain colors of cubes. Plus, all of this is held in a larger game concept: the game unfolds over "generations." You manage a first generation family at the start of the game, and as each round progresses, new family members are born and old ones die off. The workers you assign to a location may not be there forever as their advanced age catches up with them.

It may sound like a lot going on, and it certainly comes across that way in the rules. But just as you'd expect from an award-winning German board game, the actual gameplay starts to make sense almost immediately. The board is particularly well-designed in explaining the costs and benefits of specific actions, and there appear to be multiple paths to a winning victory point total, all carefully balanced against each other. (In our first play through, it appeared that one player who hadn't been in as much competition with the rest would run away with the game; in the end, he only won by a thin margin.)

Among countless German board games that use similar elements of resource gathering and building, I feel that the area in which Village shines is "indirect competition." Many games allow the players to do anything... that the opponent hasn't already done. The "picking up cubes" mechanic here is a particularly clever form of this, not only limiting the number of times an action can be taken, but establishing a value on that action. Getting to do a much-needed action AND picking up a much-needed cube color at the same time is the holy grail in this game; often times, you have to settle for only one or the other.

I'm definitely looking forward to the next time I get to play. It's a bit early yet to proclaim this a true great of the genre, but I think it has the potential.