Pencilvillage is a solo print-and-play strategy game. You manage resources, protect and grow a village, and delve into dungeons in search of treasure.
Pencilvillage has enough crunch to be satisfying, but it's light. Each game lasts an hour or less, and it's easy to pause. I set out to make the most interesting puzzle possible for the fewest rules and the simplest possible systems.
- The rules fit on a single page.
- You customize each game with setup options, which also fit on a single page. These include a selection of:
- * 25 objectives, which broadly direct your town's development
- * 15 characters, which come with their own strengths, weaknesses, and terrain preferences, forcing you to adapt your strategy
- * 26 mods, which add mind-bending rules to the game and can be combined for even more interesting challenges
- Then you choose from four maps. Maps come in two halves:
- * A cheery overworld on top, with varied (and mechanically crucial) terrain, where you build your village
- * An oppressive underworld at the bottom, where your brave heroes quest through dungeons to slay monsters and bring home treasure
- The combination of objective, character, mods and map add up to a substantially unique experience each time you play.
- Once your game is set up, you play with only two sheets of paper. That's it. These include all the tables, references, systems and terrain you need for a satisfying strategic experience. No paging through manuals looking for stuff! The experience is absurdly slick.
Broadly speaking, you spend the first half of the game building out your town in the overworld while you spin up your economy, and the second half of the game sprinting to fulfil your objective while questing as greedily as possible in the game's varied dungeons. Throughout, your town will need an increasingly stern military to survive the attacks against it.
