To be or not to be?
🏘️ Hamlet 🏘️ is all about building out a small community, expanding it with buildings and contributing to the construction of a church, so the hamlet becomes a village. This is quite an unusual game. You’d expect tile-laying for a village builder game, but the first thing you will notice are the strangely shaped tiles. The unusualness doesn’t stop here though. A big feature of the game is the communal economy - resources that are generated are not yours, instead anyone can use it (you might get some benefits from that though). This applies to buildings too - anyone can use them.
The colors and aesthetics of the game are quite cozy, but don’t let that fool you.😉 It is quite a complex game with a fair amount of cutthroat gameplay. The turn structure itself is not difficult - you move your meeples, and/or you move all your donkeys, then the next player does his turn. Meeples can activate buildings, build new ones or build roads. Roads are important because meeples can only ever go to tiles that are connected. Donkeys are key because you always use resources for actions from the board - you have no personal supply (only for coins). So daisy-chaining donkeys are the way to transport materials to where you need them.
👉 You play until the church is built then you see who scored the most points.
💬 And now the unpopular opinion: I had high expectations from Hamlet after seeing multiple very positive reviews, but it is unfortunately not for us.😔 Resources being shared were not as bad as I thought (I actually liked it) - I was afraid we would be mad at the other for taking things. Still there is more than enough confrontation in the game as you rush for milestones and try to do things without setting up the other for good turns. Playing with more than 2 would probably help as well and make it less zero-sum.
While I find the artwork beautiful, I constantly struggled to clearly see the board state. There is a lot of visual noise to filter out, and having irregular-shaped tiles makes this even harder. You can easily confuse your meeples and donkeys from a distance too.
