Native Village

Native Village
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Seaside
Illustrator(s)	Franz Vohwinkel
Card text
+2 Actions Choose one: Set aside the top card of your deck face down on your Native Village mat; or put all the cards from your mat into your hand. You may look at the cards on your mat at any time; return them to your deck at the end of the game.

Native Village is an Action card from Seaside. It is one of the non-drawing villages, since it gives +2 Actions but does not give +Cards; instead, it saves up cards on a playmat and lets you pick them up all at once later. Though it can be used as a village in a typical engine, Native Village can also be used to save up cards for one big turn, such as with the Combo: Native Village and Bridge.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When you first gain one of these, take a Native Village player mat to put cards from this on.
• When you play Native Village, either take all of the set aside cards from your Native Village player mat and put them into your hand, or set aside the top card of your deck face down (shuffling first if needed) on the Native Village player mat.
• You may choose either option even if you have no cards on your mat or no cards in your deck.
• You may look at the cards on your Native Village player mat at any time.
• At the end of the game, any cards still on your mat return to your deck for scoring.
• Native Village itself does not get set aside; it goes to your discard pile during the Clean-up phase.

Other Rules clarifications

• You are not allowed to look at the top card of your deck before doing the choice.
• If you choose to place the top card of your deck on the Native Village player mat you may then immediately look at the card, but your choice has been done.

Strategy Article

Original article by theory

The +Actions isn’t what makes this card so interesting—if all you’re looking for is more Actions, any other Village is superior. (The exception is if you have Libraries or Watchtowers and want to take advantage of its handsize-lowering effect.)

Rather, Native Village is nice for its ability to tuck away cards: it can “trash” unwanted cards, hide cards from Pirate Ships/Saboteurs, or just build up for a mega-turn. Conducting deck-inspection is quite helpful in order to guarantee what you’re drawing; similarly, Native Village is a good soft counter to Ghost Ships, Bureaucrats, and Spies, since the Victory cards they leave on your deck can be tucked away. In addition, if you can draw your entire deck, you can use Cellar/Warehouse to selectively discard Victory cards such that only Victory cards are left in your draw deck, prime targets for your Native Village to gobble up.

Nevertheless, Native Village’s “trashing” ability is pretty much the worst way to go about deck-thinning. It’s too slow when you need to single-mindedly focus on trashing, and in a thin-deck monster, Native Village’s drawing ability can more harm than good if you’ll mostly be drawing good cards. It’s useful as late game storage for Provinces/Colonies, but the chance of drawing a critical Platinum is too much of a risk.

Even without trashing, Native Village is only really viable when there’s also a way to make use of its +Actions (usually +Cards); when there isn’t, Native Village’s pseudo-trash-the-top-card ability is probably too chancy and slow to be worth buying.

If you’re pursuing Native Villages, you’ll need quite a few of them in order to recover from drawing good cards onto the Native Village mat. This means that a source of +Buy is critical for Native Village, so that you don’t repeatedly overpay for its ability.

Of course, no article on Native Village could be complete without mentioning Native Village's possibly best Combo: Native Village and Bridge. This is an unusual and simple mega-turn strategy using those two cards, and which plays differently enough to be worth its own page.

Synergies/Combos

• Bridge, for the Combo: Native Village and Bridge
• Deck-inspection (Pearl Diver, Wishing Well, Spy, Navigator), including opponents’ Spies
• Library/Watchtower
• Pirate Ship wars (both to play your own Pirate Ships, and to hide your Coppers from opponents)
• Cards that benefit from large handsizes: Bank, Coppersmith, Secret Chamber
• Opponents’ Ghost Ships/Bureaucrats
• Opponents’ Saboteurs
• Good terminals, usually +Cards
• +Buy

Antisynergies

• Strong early trashing/Ambassador
• Philosopher's Stone
• Counting House
• Embargo (on the Native Villages)

Trivia

Official card art.

In other languages

• Czech: Domorodá vesnice
• Dutch: Inheems Dorp
• French: Village indigène
• German: Eingeborenendorf
• Italian: Villaggio Indigeno
• Japanese: 原住民の村 (pron. genjūmin no mura)
• Spanish: Poblado Indígena

Card Art

The art connects with Pirate Ship to the left.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, 'Art Trivia'

Secret History

Originally this had you unable to look at the set aside cards. Celebrity guest playtester Richard Garfield at first misplayed this to let you look at the cards, then suggested, hey, why not change it so you can. We tried it both ways and well it was close. In the end I felt like serious players might actually prefer not being able to peek. However being able to peek made the card a little more powerful (so serious players would play it more), and, I felt, a little more attractive to casual players, who don't want to be counting cards so much. As you can see we went with peeking.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Seaside Cards