Village: Inn Expansion Review

Village is a fun game that allows players to pursue various paths while seeing the cycle of life play out in their family. It’s well worth playing. Village Inn, however, takes this fun title and turns it into something that is truly spectacular. I wouldn’t call this a mandatory expansion, because the game is fun without it. But after incorporating it into the base game, you’ll never want to go back.

Village Inn adds a new craft good (beer) and a new action space (the tavern). Players can now place one of their family members at the tavern where he presumably spends all day drinking and making friends. Those friends, though, can be key to winning the game.

The expansion comes with 30 friend cards that provide in-game abilities or end-game scoring options. Obtaining them gives you unique goals and greatly changes the incentives of how you want to play your strategy. Suddenly, old actions you rarely took become much more inviting.

Your tavern dweller is subject to the same progress of time as the rest of your family. But there is no place in the Founder’s Book for a degenerate drunkard. Instead, they always go to the anonymous graves. But that’s a fair price to pay for the friends your family can make.

For instance, the Scrap Dealer lets you take an unpurchased market tile for free. Depending on how intently the other players are preparing for market (or if you take the market cube before they are ready), you can grab big points. The Medico gives you end-game points for each surviving family member. Having him aboard will shift your priorities to keeping family alive and making as many of them as possible. And the Bard will add a dead family member to the Book of Remembrance even if there is no room for him. The catchy songs ensue they won’t be forgotten.

While the tavern and the friend cards are the sexiest part of the expansion, it isn’t the only improvement. Even though there is now an additional action, it actually increases a lot of the competition. Typically, most or all players will want a tavern dweller so they can pick up friends. This means that those friend cards will cycle quickly and brewers are working overtime. But a clever player can also exploit that and get uncontested access to the clergy or city council.

Village Inn also adds the components for a fifth player. The game actually does a pretty good job of absorbing another person because it can easily raise or lower the amount of cubes in the action spaces.

Village Inn greatly expands the decision space of Village. It manipulates players’ incentives in interesting ways – especially as it relates to actions on the main board. This takes the settled strategies of the base game and tweaks all of them into something new and exciting. If you like the base game, then definitely check out this expansion.