Villagers is a tableau building and card drafting game for one to five players, set in a faraway land not unlike medieval Europe. The Black Death has taken a heavy toll, and the survivors, people from all walks of life, now look to the future and gather together to build new communities.

Each player is in charge of populating a new village, with the aim of becoming the most prosperous. The game revolves around a central “road” of cards. In the draw phase, players take a number of villager cards into their hand from the road, equal to the amount of food their village produces. This is followed by a build phase in which cards can be played from a players’ hand into their village, depending on how many builders their village has.

Cards are played in production chains, starting with basic resource producing cards such as the Lumberjack, Miner, or Hayer, who can each support two chains of related workers. The top villager in a production chain can generate income which is converted to coins each time there is a market phase, which happens once early on in the game, and again at the end. At the end of the second market phase, scores are totalled and the winner decided. In the second market phase only, certain villagers generate conditional amounts of gold, providing big bonuses for those who build their villages carefully.

Special villager cards allow for crafty strategic play, and certain villagers produce tools and equipment that others need, using an interactive padlock mechanism, allowing you to profit from what your opponents build.

The game comes with a solo mode where a lone village strives to prosper in spite of the dreaded Countess and her evil machinations.