is a Kickstarter funded tabletop game where a group of villagers in a small idyllic hamlet seek to build themselves a church and convert their tiny home into a proper town. This is done via players hiring workers and donkeys, harvesting resources, creating new buildings and establishing supply lines to expand their budding burg into the surrounding wilderness.Players can make transactions at the local market and acquire new blueprints to place more tiles on the map, which can produce a variety of beneficial effects. One unique feature about the game is that players are expected to work cooperatively for the most part since all resources, roads and most abilities are shared universally by all players. Of course, only one person can actually win in the end which can encourage plenty of building material "theft" and backstabbing, among other selfish actions.
The game ends once all six pieces of the church are placed and the little hamlet finally becomes a full fledged town. Points are then tallied up (with many tiles and awards providing potent bonuses) and a new mayor is formally declared from the player group to serve as the victor.
Hamlet Provides examples of:
- Anti-Hoarding: There are many incentives for players to not hold onto supplies for too long as most resources in the game are shared by everyone. This can make players think twice before generating building materials or placing tiles and roads since all the other players can use them as well. Additionally, a player can only hold three tile blueprints at a time, encouraging them to build at a steady pace or risk losing a high value building or landmark to a rival.
- Broken Bridge: An almost literal example. Tiles without roads cannot be accessed by workers or donkeys until somebody builds a bridge to connect them together with another tile. That means no taking shortcuts through the nearby forests and mountains until a proper path is cleared.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each player has several color coded game pieces to distinguish themselves from the other players. The available colors are red, blue, yellow and green.
- Constantly Lactating Cow: All a player needs to do to generate some milk is build a Dairy Farm or Cow Conservatory and deliver some wheat to it. No other actions or resources are ever needed, implying that simply having a worker feed a cow some food is all it requires to produce milk.
- Diligent Draft Animal: Donkey pieces are absolutely vital in maintaining effective supply lines in the late game when the map has been greatly expanded. Unlike the human workers donkeys can't take actions on buildings and can only move a single tile per turn, but make up for it by costing far less to buy, being able to act immediately instead of waiting a turn and the game allowing the player to have up to six of them at one time. (As opposed to the human workers max limit of four.)
- First-Player Advantage Mitigation: The later players receive more starting gold coins than the earlier players do.
- Patchwork Map: Heavily downplayed. Players piece together the map tiles like a puzzle as the town slowly expands but get more bonus points at the end of the game for properly matching tiles up with similar terrain. For example, both mountain ranges and woodlands tiles give a reward for each of their segments that border other mountains and forests.
