Monsters

The players in Village Attacks eschew playing as the nicey-nicey good guys and instead play as various monsters from folklore, myth and legend. They are none too impressed with the hubris of the righteous rabble gathering at their gates and have roused from their slumbers to bring blade, claw, sorcery and maw to defend their precious castle heart and hopefully restock their larders while teaching the mortal cattle a lesson! Each monster possesses their own unique abilities that they are able to level up by slaying villagers and completing objectives. Monsters are categorised into types and classes, which can affect how they interact with the enemy forces. Hunters and Town Heroes deal extra damage to monsters that match their types, creating a new level of strategy and planning.

Dashboards
Players control their Monster via the miniature's associated Dashboard. Lore for that particular Monster is printed on the reverse side.

A visual depiction of the Monster is displayed on the left side of the Dashboard.

Across the top from left to right players will find their Monster's Class, XP needed to level, Name, Type & health/Hit Points (HP).

Down the middle of the Dashboard are the spaces to place their dice, once rolled, to defend against attacks, reserve for future use and to move around the castle interior's game board.

Finally, down the right side of the Dashboard are the Monsters skills.

Classes
Every Monster has a class, denoted by a stylised shield, explosion or vertical arrows. These represent the classes of Guardian, Decimator & Support respectively. Village Attacks is designed to have the balance of at least one of each Type of Monster in a party but this is not essential.

Guardian The tanks of the group, Guardians are the chaps who step up and bar the way. They can't always stop the Villagers from getting past them but they can take a beating more than any other class. Usually designed with a high pool of health, a decent number of Defence dice slots and abilities to hinder the progress of the invading rabble (aside from slaughtering them in droves, that is), Guardians can often stun, block and kill Villagers in their zone while using Defence and Retaliation dice results to offset incoming damage.

Decimator Revelling in unmitigated slaughter, Decimators can dish out death in good measure (depending on dice results, of course!) but can't always take it themselves. Keeping them away from Nemesis Hunters & Town Heroes should be a priority unless you want to take a messy and painful trip back to the castle heart in shame. Decimators often have a good amount of Reserve or Movement spaces for dice results; they rely on dice results more than the other two Classes to get their work done as even their passive abilities usually require an Attack result to get stuck in.

Support If the tough guys are one brick and the killy guys are another, the flexibility of the Support Class is the mortar holding them together and keeping things working. Support are the Monsters who can do a little bit of everything, helped by a balanced dice space design, including healing themselves and other Monsters which is a critical function. When Monsters run out of HPs they unsurprisingly die, resurrecting back at the castle heart which hits the castle heart for two damage. When your castle heart hits zero it's game over. Healing fellow Monsters keeps your castle heart healthy which means all of you live longer to slaughter the mortals misguidedly serving themselves unto your plates. Support aren't just healers though; they're often capable of handling themselves in combat and then using their utility to quickly move or buy time to relocate when required.

Experience
Killing Villagers in Village Attacks rewards experience points; a single point for Peasants and Hunters (regardless of Hunter Type) and two points for taking the last hit point from a Town Hero (three points if the Hero is the same Type as the attacking Monster). Green XP tokens are used to keep track of XP gained, once a Monster accrues the number of XP tokens as listed on their Dashboard they are able to "level up". When levelling up, a Monster can discard the pool of XP tokens to select a new skill card for their Dashboard, or turn over an already assigned skill card to upgrade that skill.

Once a Monster has levelled up five times and maxed out their skills, when they next accrue enough XP to level up they can heal 1 HP or remove one negative effect on their Dashboard instead, discarding all XP tokens when doing so.

Name & Type
Every Monster has a name, which is displayed on their Dashboard betwixt the XP and HP values. Arguably more interesting is the Type of that Monster, as this has a significant impact on receiving damage from Hunters and Town Heroes (and the killing of these latter guys) of the same Type as the Monster they're engaging.

There are five Types of Monster/Hunter/Town Hero in Village Attacks, each of which is denoted by a colour and symbol:

Arcane (purple), Cursed (blue), Demonic (yellow), Mythic (red) & Undead (green).

The colour for each Type is displayed as a background colour on Dashboards for Monsters, cards for Town Heroes and on the clip-on base rings for Monsters, Hunters & Town Heroes, enabling players to see at a glance which Villagers in play are the greatest threat to their Monster and the party as a whole. Hunters and Town Heroes matching a Monster's Type do +1 additional damage to those Monsters per attack, so factoring this into plans is vital. The Dullahan may have 10 health but that will be gone in 5 hits from Mythic Hunters/Heroes unless Defence results can stave off some damage. Unfortunately, Monsters get no such benefit when attacking Villagers of their Type. But hey, a Monster's home is literally his castle, so bring it!

Heath
All Monsters (and Town Heroes) have a pool of Health, or Hit Points (HP) representing how much damage they can take before they are slain. When a model with a HP value takes damage, place a damage token on their Dashboard/card to show that they've taken a wound. When the number of tokens accrued equals their Health value that model is slain. Town Heroes are removed from the board until they respawn and Monsters are resurrected in the castle heart, which as already mentioned in the Support section, damages the heart in the process. This is an important mechanic to note as it is both very useful in that when your Monster dies it isn't permanent, leaving you to sit about watching your mates try to pick up the slack, and it's an effective way to get back to the castle heart fast to defend it in a situation where it would otherwise sustain more damage than than from resurrecting (which is the lesson of the very first scenario) but such tactics have to be used sparingly as the castle heart cannot be healed unless a scenario specifically allows it.

Dice Spaces
These weird black spaces are used for placing dice which have been rolled (or Reserved) and display a suitable symbol. Unless otherwise stated in the rules, Villager dice results cannot be used by Monsters in any way. The Dice page holds the full skinny on what each result means but some of that info will be briefly covered here too. These spaces are split into Defence, Reserve and Movement.

Movement

These spaces are used to move a Monster around the game board. As the least restrictive space it's often best to start with how this one works. When a player starts their turn, they roll their six dice (unless any are Reserved) and study the results. Villager results are either re-rolled if there's three or more, otherwise those dice are removed from the pool and processed immediately. The remaining five kinds of results can be used to perform specific actions via abilities/skills or Defence spaces, but any result can be placed into a Movement space to enable the Monster to move from the zone they're in to an adjacent connected zone. The more dice used to fill available Movement spaces the more zones a Monster can move.

Movement can be reduced if a Monster has received a Slow effect, where a Slow token is used to cover a Movement space, but a Monster can never be reduced to less than 1 Movement, making the few Monsters with a single Movement space effectively immune to Slow.

Defence

These spaces can only be used to place Defence (absorb damage) and Retaliation (reflect damage) dice results. Guardians generally have more of these than other Classes, allowing them to shrug off some damage or thin the attackers' numbers somewhat.

The Sunder effect is used to prevent dice from being placed in these spaces, considerably weakening the defences of the afflicted Monster.

Reserve

Any of the five usable dice results can be placed here to be stored indefinitely for future use. If a player rolls three or more of the same result all those dice can be re-rolled but it has to be all dice of that result, including any held in Reserve.

Overview
On the reverse side of the dashboard is the lore, or background, for that particular monster accompanied by the concept art used in the design.