Watch a community blossom into a fully fledged town in competitive board game Hamlet

Craft a unique and growing ‘burg one tile at a time in Hamlet, an upcoming board game from the designer of Petrichor and The Mountain. The competitive experience with an in-development solo mode comes to Kickstarter in November.

Hamlet tasks a group of one to four players with shepherding a fledgling group of homes and farms as they prosper towards becoming a proper town. Doing so requires constructing a church to act as the cornerstone and spiritual center of the hamlet, but that’s a lofty project that will require a hefty amount of resources and time from all involved.

Gameplay in Hamlet is split across three Ages denoted by bags of tiles denoting different resource-producing buildings, such as farms, mines and woodcutters. These tiles aren’t uniform or standardized by type, so each play session’s hamlet will grow in its own fashion. As ages progress, buildings that can change those raw materials into usable - or sellable - goods can be constructed, opening up new routes for scoring points. Everyone can use the tiles once they’re placed, so strategy will likely depend on limiting the competition's access without cutting your own legs from beneath you.

Individual turns comprise purchasing buildings from the available tiles, using workers to collect resources from already constructed aspects of the village or refine them into more valuable and useful components, and investing those materials towards finishing new additions. Pretty much any move that gets the group closer to completing the church earns victory points, and the player at the end with the most will take home victory.

Hamlet is designed by David Chircop, who previously worked on condensation-based strategy game Petrichor and economic worker-placement title The Pursuit of Happiness. The art will be done by illustrator Yusuf Artun, with this seemingly the first board game in their portfolio.

Publisher Mighty Board previously worked with Chircop on Petrichor but have also helped produce Excavation Earth, a science fiction economics game about aliens procuring long-forgotten human artifacts from Earth’s surface, along with the historical wargame Days of Ire: Budapest 1956.

Hamlet will launch a Kickstarter campaign on November 9th to crowdfund production as well as the currently in-development solo mode. No price or expected shipping date has yet been announced.