by Peter Hayward

I had a dream.

In 2015, I had a dream. Actually, I probably had a dream every night, but this one was significant: I dreamt the mechanisms for a card game:

That’s a quote from a board game chat I was in at the time. I shared the mechanisms from my dream, in case anyone knew whether I was subconsciously borrowing from another game or not.

One of those friends, Tom Lang, thought about the game and came back a few hours later with a more developed pitch:

If you’ve played Village Pillage, you’ll recognize the above as about 90% of the final game.

I was excited:

The working title was “Backstabbards”, and we spent the night making cards and putting rules together. Here are the starting cards we had for that first draft:

And here’s what the starting cards ended up looking like in the final game:

I’m at around two dozen published games at this point, and I’ve never had another game stay so similar from first idea to final product.

Here’s what we had at that early stage: Each turn, you play a card on either side of you, one against each neighbor. What those cards do is based on what your opponent plays: If you attack a farm, they gain resources and you steal it. If you don’t want to be attacked, play a wall. If your opponent is playing a wall…well, that’s the perfect time to play a farm!

As Tom said, it’s a simple game of rock-paper-scissors.

(Fun fact: Different countries order the elements of that game in a different order. In Australia, it’s scissors-paper-rock.)

We discussed the game for a few hours, realizing that the system didn’t incorporate any way to win or gain new cards, so the Merchant was born: Play the Merchant to buy a relic, and if you can’t afford to, buy a card.

I prepped a prototype and ran it the next day at a playtesting event:

The game has only two other mechanisms, each added to fill out the design a little. Instead of just defending, walls got a bank mechanism, putting a turnip (up to a maximum of 5) where it couldn’t be stolen by attack cards.

And a final keyword was added: exhaust. An exhausted card sits out for a round – some cards exhaust themselves, some cards exhaust others.

From that small list of keywords, we put together a market deck — the “cooler actions from the middle” — of interesting, thematic cards. My co-designer Tom has some words to say about this process:

The design space of “does a different thing depending on who it’s against” + the keywords gain, steal, bank, buy a card, and exhaust allowed for about two dozen thematic cards, like the Toll Bridge, a wall who charges Raiders and Merchants, or the Treasury, who banks more turnips than any other card.

Even just a card that does something unusual for its “suit” is interesting: The Pickler is a Farmer who gains four turnips, then immediately banks two of them. Cathedral is a Wall that buys new cards.

Through trial and error, we came up with some “rules” for ourselves: Starting Farmers gain 3 turnips, so market Farmers needed to gain a baseline of 4 + an ability. Some Farmers gain 5, but with a weakness.

Similarly, starting Raiders steal 4, market Raiders steal 5 + an ability, and some Raiders steal a whopping 6, but with a weakness, such as the Cutpurse who steals 6…but is stolen from when she goes up against an enemy Raider. The Berserker steals 6, but is stolen from when she goes up against a Wall. The Outlaw steals 5 and gets a free card if it faces a Merchant.

Walls were a little harder to differentiate, but we came up with some fun stuff. My favorite is the Moat, which absolutely kicks a Raider’s butt…but waters enemy Farmers, letting them gain +1 turnip.

We quickly found more rules that would break the game if broken: Raiders must be great against Farmers, and Walls must be great against Raiders. Playing a Farmer against a Wall is inherently good (because of the opportunity cost), but if they had a specific interaction, it needed to always benefit the Farmer. We never wanted to “punish” someone for playing a Farmer against a Wall.

Merchants were the hardest to expand out. We ended up with only two: the Bard, who gains you a card from the top of the deck so that no one knows what you have, and the Doctor, who exhausts whichever card is played against him.

For many years, Village Pillage was my best-selling and best-known game. There’s something incredibly clean about it: You play a card to the left and to the right, you resolve them, repeat until someone wins. (Tom Lang deserves the credit for that; I spent many years filling my games with so much unnecessary cruft.)

So how the heck do you expand a game like that?

Our first attempt was to add a second currency: pumpkins. The first expansion for Village Pillage was going to be called Dark Arts & Crafts, which added magic into the fantasy setting. We tried a few different versions, but we couldn’t get it working. The issues were:

1. How do you acquire pumpkins, and

2. What do you do with them when you get them

For an expansion entirely based around pumpkins, you can see why that posed a problem.

Instead, we decided to go simpler. We’d maxed out the design space with our original twenty market cards, so to justify an expansion, we’d need new mechanisms.

In the original Village Pillage, we’d strictly kept all interaction to neighbors. You play against your neighbors, and you resolve against your neighbors. After the game came out, we had a lot of commenters wishing they could interact across the table – when playing with five people, they wanted it to be more than a three-player game — so we added some cards that cared about the total number of cards in play of a particular type:

In addition to that, we came up with provoke – the opposite of exhaust. A provoked card must be played next turn, though you still get to choose which side to play it on:

Those two small mechanisms were enough for about a dozen new cards, like the Beekeeper, who gains 5 while each other Farmer in play also gains 1, or the Matador, who provokes any enemy Raider it’s played against.

Twelve new cards wasn’t really enough to justify a full expansion, so we put our heads together and realized the root of the problem:

To keep the base game simple, we hadn’t individually “costed” the cards. If you played a Merchant and couldn’t afford a relic (the victory condition of the game), you instead paid a turnip and gained a new, more powerful card. No matter which card, you always paid one turnip.

This mean that all the cards had to be (approximately) balanced to each other. If one was significantly worse, it wouldn’t be bought and would just clog up the market — and we deliberately avoided any kind of “clear the market” mechanism because if people consistently didn’t want to buy a card, we cut it from the game.

Like I said, each upgraded card was basically one turnip stronger than a starting card + an ability (or two turnips stronger + a weakness), but if we added a “cheaper” card type into the game, something between the strength of a starter card and an upgraded card…well, suddenly we had a lot more design space:

What’s more, cards had always been permanent additions to your village, but since these cards were acquired easily, it made sense for them to leave easily as well. Lo, a new keyword was born: sacrifice. Sacrificed cards are returned to the bottom of the deck.

And once cards were no longer permanent, this opened the door to stealing them from other players.

These new mechanisms allowed enough design space for another dozen cards, so we had two smaller expansions, and a friend of ours, Lauren O’Connor, came up with the names Surf and Turf. The nautically themed Surf added freebooters, the easily-bought cards, while Turf was dedicated to four-legged friends, from dogs to frogs to camels to ravens – the cards that provoked cards and cared about other cards in play.

A few years later, when people were clamoring for more Village Pillage, I was worried we’d explored all the available design space. I figured that instead we’d just give them the big box that everyone had been asking for, along with a handful of promo cards.

Tom was too busy and gave me his blessing to make the promo cards without him. I walked to a café, pulled out my iPad, and started brainstorming. When I’m first starting a game, it always grows from a central mechanical idea, and I have to scramble to find a theme for it.

But once I have a theme that I like, I can ask, “Okay, what would fit in this world?” So many Village Pillage cards started from theme, got cool mechanisms…then Tom Lang came in and worked out a more fitting theme for them.

For this set of promo cards, what made sense in the world of Village Pillage? It didn’t take long for me to think of Robin Hood as a direction, and that immediately led me to a richer/poorer mechanism. Anyone with more turnips than you is richer, while anyone with fewer turnips is poorer.

It turned out this was a particularly fertile design space, and a few hours later, I had dozens of cards: Robin Hood, who steals more when against a rich opponent; Prince John, a Merchant who pays less for relics based on how many of his neighbors are poor; Little John, a Wall who steals 5 (the most a Wall has ever stolen!) if the opponent is rich. If you’re rich, don’t go picking on your poor neighbors, or you might encounter Little John.

(“But don’t let my name fool you. In real life, I’m very big!”)

While designing, I found another unexplored pocket of design space: cards that react differently when they’re against a starting card: The Sheriff of Nottingham steals +2 turnips against starting cards, which is a nice way to reflect the bullying nature of the character.

The Robin Hood mythos had so many characters that we ended up with thirty new market cards.

Then — finally! — we got pumpkins working, with special thanks to Sara Perry, who brought us a long way towards cracking it. Dark Arts and Crafts will be the final Village Pillage expansion, and it’s now part of the Village Pillage: Big Box that Robbin’ Hood was meant to be.

We could probably rummage through drawers and find another mechanism or two — in fact, the Big Box is coming with three mini-expansions — but we’re happy with everything we’ve added to the game. Dark Arts and Craft will be the last expansion for Village Pillage. We’ve expanded it to a ridiculous degree and want to go out on a high – and wearing a Very Big Hat.

And it all started with a dream…

Peter C. Hayward