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Pencilvillage

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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.

Every action has been meticulously streamlined to reduce the fiddliness factor. Resource structures produce in fixed amounts, discount mechanics are scarce, gain and loss is as simple as rotating a die or moving tokens, there's very little erasing, and thoughtfully designed trackers make the systems clear at a glance.

The depth has not suffered as a result of this streamlining. Every round, you will weigh up competing priorities, trade off long-term direction and short-term necessity, and make meaningful decisions with substantial consequences.


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Reviews (6)
Discussions (13)
Customer avatar
Lesley N December 03, 2022 10:53 pm UTC
PURCHASER
This confusing, badly in need of some possible text cosmetic clean up title, is all the same hiding some real interesting potential for simple fun.

The text in the names of the underground locations is a type font that seems entirely too blocky. Everything else though seems fine. Graphically, it could maybe use a small facelift. But I found over all, it was worth my few bucks.

I would call this an ideal cafe amusement or coffee break game.
I could see a person crafting little reusable building pieces.
I could see myself possible crafting new maps perhaps.

There is no shortage of more of the same out there... this was finally something a bit better than the norm. Kudos to the creator. You have a good game designing imagination.
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Customer avatar
Andrew B December 21, 2022 9:26 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Hi Lesley, thanks for your kind words :) The underground location names should look like this https://i.imgur.com/CEgIB1Z.png - I suspect I used an obscure font that isn't installed on your PC or recognized by your PDF reader for some reason. Trying a different PDF viewing application might fix it, but otherwise, sorry about that. I'm glad you enjoyed yourself and see possibilities for creativity around the game :)
Customer avatar
Harry B June 06, 2021 3:37 pm UTC
PURCHASER
OK here it is: I would love to buy more of your games except for one thing, You never put all the information in about the game ... if it is a multi player game, a co-op game or a solo game. I'm a co-op and solo player and I'm stuck with tons of games I thought were but aren't one of the two and I thought they were. That is why I don't buy allot more from your company. If you would change to give all the information we need out here you will sell allot more ... my opinion only. ... still love ya man !!
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Customer avatar
Andrew B June 07, 2021 8:00 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Heya Harry, thanks for the feedback, and I'm sorry to hear about your frustration. I've got to admit I'm a bit confused, haha. I've only made solo games so far, so you shouldn't have run into any problems with my catalogue, and the word "solo" is mentioned early in all my description blurbs. Is there maybe some category or tag system on DriveThru that I'm missing?
Customer avatar
Justin S March 19, 2021 2:05 pm UTC
PURCHASER
I am confused about two things.

Firstly, the Overseer. It states "A: Gain 3w per Mill, 2s per Quarry, and p per House, max. 3w 2s p per Overseer." So if I have two mills and one Quarry, do I gain 6w and 2s per action? Why does it say "max"? What does "3w 2s p per Overseer" mean exactly? What is the benefit of building more than one Overseer?

Secondly, building a House requires a p, right? So if I build a bunch of buildings and use up all my starting p before I build a house, then I can't build any more buildings this game as I have no ability to generate more p (except 9 & 10 events)?
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Customer avatar
Andrew B March 22, 2021 7:08 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Hi Justin

Each Overseer lets you activate up to one Mill + Quarry + House with a single action. So in your example, even if you've built two Mills and one Quarry, activating one Overseer would get you 3w 2s. This is what the "max. 3w 2s p per Overseer" clause constrains you to. Building a second Overseer means that you can now activate up to two Mill/Quarry/Houses per round, so you'd get your 6w 2s per action for having two Mills and one Quarry, or up to a maximum of 6w 4s 2p if you had two of each structure.

Yep, you pretty much need to build a House with one of your starting p. :)

Shout if you have any other questions!

Andrew
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Customer avatar
Justin S March 22, 2021 12:47 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Thanks, Andrew! Very cool engine you've made. I can see it being easily translated into video game form!
Customer avatar
May 17, 2020 10:19 pm UTC
Looking to use this as a way to design settings for Pathfinder! :)
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Customer avatar
Andrew B May 20, 2020 6:23 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Heya, yeah, you can get some pretty organic-looking towns out of it :) Happy campaigning!
Customer avatar
Joseph S January 07, 2020 12:54 am UTC
In the playthrough video, you give yourself 5p and 3w at the start. I don't see that anywhere in the rules/setup. Was that just for the demonstration, or is that how we should start out?
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Customer avatar
Andrew B January 07, 2020 7:16 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Check out the "Start" paragraph, bottom-right of the Rules page :)
Customer avatar
Marc-Eric M October 11, 2019 7:12 pm UTC
PURCHASER
When printing the this with my printer, it is hard to tell apart fields and forests, due to the contrast. Maybe the maps could be made a little bit darker?
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Customer avatar
Andrew B October 26, 2019 8:22 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Hi Marc :) The way things stand are a best-effort middle ground between user feedback and design goals. I'm unable to deliver exactly what everyone wants, and maintaining multiple versions gets very time-consuming. Some prefer things lighter, I want buildings to stand out, and I don't want to nuke people's printer ink. Can I suggest experimenting with the "darkness" setting when you print, to see if you can get it where you want it?
Customer avatar
Łukasz K September 09, 2019 3:55 am UTC
PURCHASER
I'm conflused how the armourer works. "Give 1 different Hero per Armourer +1 Power" - So if I have 2 heroes and only 1 armourer, then during an armourer action only 1 of them can get +1, but what about another turn? Can I give an additional +1 to the hero who already got +1 in a previous turn? If so, what is the maximum? Though if one could be so overpowered, what would be the point of having more heroes?
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Customer avatar
Andrew B September 09, 2019 5:04 am UTC
PUBLISHER
It sounds like you understand correctly. If you have one Armourer, one Hero of your choice gets +1 Power each time you use its action. You are free to give the same Hero +1 repeatedly. (You have to split the +1s you hand out, so two Armourers can't give +2 to a single Hero each action.)

You get a whole d6 worth of additional combat power with each new Hero, so it is way more effective in many situations to add more Heroes instead of just Armouring up one or two.
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Customer avatar
Łukasz K September 11, 2019 4:03 am UTC
PURCHASER
Thank you for the clarification. Another strange rule seems to be movement, in that it's distance is shared between overground and dungeon distance - this makes it reasonable to always build next to a dungeon entrance first, losing only 1 movement points before entering, with any longer travel it's hard to have any movement points left to move around the dungeon.

Also, the additional cost of already existing buildings - does it need to be paid with each new one, even for buildings that already were paid? I mean 1st house is 2w, 2nd is 2w+3w, 3rd is 2w+3w+3w, 4th is 2w+3w+3w+3w, correct? Or maybe it's 1st 2w, 2nd 2w+3w, and every new after that is also 2w+3w? If it's cumulative does this reset if a building gets destroyed or perhaps it's for each building of this type ever built in the game?

At Towncenter lvl3 there is a noticeable difficulty spike with buildings requiring gold to build (especially additional copies of buildings), but there's no easy way to get gold at this point, having...See more
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Customer avatar
Andrew B September 11, 2019 10:03 am UTC
PUBLISHER
I mean, it's a puzzle :) I can solve some of it for you if you like, but then I'm stealing the experience of figuring it out from you. Keep reading at your peril.

Yep, the movement system very intentionally prevents you from just clearing every dungeon the second you have heroes up and running. Starting near an entrance gives you easy access to one dungeon, and you have more than enough time while building up to heroes to sprawl your village over to another entrance. That gives you two easily accessible dungeons.

Per the rules, the amount in brackets must be paid once for each of the same building present in the village. So your third house costs 8w. (Yes, you only count currently-"alive" buildings.)

The gold bottleneck is very intentional, and it's one of the main puzzles in the game. You are undervaluing dungeon loot :)
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Customer avatar
Łukasz K September 17, 2019 4:50 am UTC
PURCHASER
OK, thank you for the tips and clarifications. In the building price, the word "once" was what caused the confusion (once in the whole game or once during each building phase).
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Customer avatar
Andrew B September 17, 2019 8:54 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Aha, I see how that could be ambiguous! Unfortunately I have to trade off brevity and clarity a little bit to keep it light.
Customer avatar
Gerhard E. K August 22, 2019 4:58 pm UTC
PURCHASER
This one looks very interesting! I like those Roll&Write games and especially the ones you can play solo. And yes, I understand it's nice to say "just ONE page of rules" and "just TWO pages for play", but the text is very small (too small IMHO - I'm 50+ and need a looking glass to be able to read it...).
Would it be possible to have a version with 16 pages (each page split into 2 pages - if printed double-sided it's still just 8 pages!)? ;)
BTW: Letter + A4 format would be a big plus. And I bought Penciltown as well...
Reply
Customer avatar
Andrew B August 26, 2019 5:47 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
Hi Gerhard :) I agree, the font is really small. I get a lot of requests for personalized tweaks like this and it is unfortunately impractical for me to deliver on all of them - I would be simultaneously maintaining hundreds of versions of the document. But! After a few versions have passed and it looks like there are no more changes to be made to the content, I will look at the wishlist (which your request is now on) and fulfil as many as possible. Sorry about the inconvenience. (If you have a friendly neighbourhood print shop, maybe grab a bunch of copies in A3 for the time being?)
Customer avatar
Craig R August 13, 2019 7:57 am UTC
PURCHASER
Just finished my first play on Emerald Copse. Very cool and absolutely worth it! I got a little confused about houses at first (thinking that I only got 1p per house I built). Once I realized it was an action, I was able to fix things up and still win. Admittedly I chose what seemed like a simple objective. I can easily see playing again and clearly it can get much more challenging! Awesome stuff.
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Customer avatar
Andrew B August 13, 2019 10:00 am UTC
PUBLISHER
I'm so glad you enjoyed yourself :) Yeah, I am prototyping ways to make what's part of the action clearer, hopefully it helps on that front.
Customer avatar
James K August 12, 2019 6:34 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Do you have an email address or Twitter account where you may be contacted with questions?
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Customer avatar
Andrew B August 12, 2019 8:39 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
Drop me a line any time at pt@andrewbackhouse.com :)
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Customer avatar
James K August 13, 2019 12:22 pm UTC
PURCHASER
I sent you an email with an interview request. Thanks, Andrew.
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Customer avatar
Andrew B August 13, 2019 2:36 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
Got it :)
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Customer avatar
Robert L August 24, 2019 11:42 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Looking forward to seeing/hearing reading said interview
Customer avatar
Pierre S August 07, 2019 3:37 am UTC
PURCHASER
Good stuff! But in the last map there is an underground dungeon called Crumbling Catalogue. Did you mean Crumbling Catacomb?
Reply
Customer avatar
Andrew B August 07, 2019 7:59 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Hey thanks :) Nope, 'Catalogue' is intentional. It's very minimal flavour, but the intention was to evoke the idea of a ruined, crumbling library.
Customer avatar
Casey C July 31, 2019 5:14 pm UTC
What's the difference between this and Penciltown? I've been thinking about getting Penciltown for a while, and then I see this come up.
Reply
Customer avatar
Andrew B August 02, 2019 6:00 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Penciltown is around a 6-hour game, with a much more fine-grained simulation. It's fiddly, but deep and satisfying. Pencilvillage games run about an hour, are much less fiddly, and are simpler (but still strategic!). So "do you want a 1-hour game or a 6-hour game?" is a good place to start. Thanks for your interest :)
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Customer avatar
Robert L August 23, 2019 7:57 am UTC
PURCHASER
Cheers mate! I was wondering the same thing.
Customer avatar
David P July 30, 2019 3:06 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Andrew B seems like a very passionate designer who is accessible and interested in supporting the community. The price for this is a steal for what you get!
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Customer avatar
Andrew B August 02, 2019 5:58 am UTC
PUBLISHER
Thanks so much for the kind words :)
Reply
Customer avatar
Steven F August 09, 2019 1:29 am UTC
PURCHASER
Agreed! I'm excited to try pencil town as well.
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File Last Updated:
September 08, 2019
This title was added to our catalog on July 29, 2019.
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