Village Fair
The Village Fair is a cooperative event in which you and the other members produce four assigned products and collect challenge points for them. Besides the cooperative version there's also the Village Fair - Solo Challenge, which you can play even without being in a cooperative. Your placement in the league then decides whether you move up for better rewards or drop down.
The Village Fair is worth it for anyone with production up and running and a bit of time to work through challenges, because you don't lose points even when you miss a quota, so it's a risk-free activity with nice rewards on top. You'll get the most out of it if you actively work with jokers and don't forget to overfill quotas for the bonuses.
You join the Village Fair through a cooperative or on your own in the solo challenge
To play the classic Village Fair you have to be a member of a cooperative, or simply found one yourself. In the cooperative you then work through challenges together with the others and produce the four required products, which earn you challenge points.
If you don't have a cooperative or don't fancy joining one, there's also the Village Fair - Solo Challenge. For that you don't need cooperative membership at all, the principle of producing four products and collecting challenge points is the same, you just play for yourself.
Leagues decide promotion, relegation and the quality of the rewards
At the start, players and cooperatives are sorted into five leagues.
- bronze
- silver
- gold
- platinum
- diamond
Depending on where you finish in your league you then move up or drop down, and the change only takes effect in the next round of the Village Fair. A higher league means better rewards, so it's worth fighting for the best possible placement. To give everyone a decent shot at promotion, each league is also split into smaller groups of players or cooperatives at a similar level, so you're not measured against the very strongest competition in the whole league.
Challenges generate four products tailored to your production
Individual challenges are generated according to the strengths and weaknesses of your production (or your cooperative's) and you can play the same challenge more than once. Bonus score and challenge support are only credited the first time you play a given challenge - on a repeat you're playing just for the points themselves.
You get points for every item produced according to the product's value, an apple is worth more points than meadow flowers. Meeting the required quota on an individual product gives you a bonus on top of the base score, and if you hit the quota on all four at once, a much bigger bonus is waiting. On top of that you never walk away from a challenge empty-handed - even if you don't make the quota, the challenge points you've earned stay with you.
Challenges can be filtered by duration, by product type (processed goods, stable, orchard or soil products) and by whether producing on the main farm is enough or whether you also need the gourmet or flower farm. Inside a cooperative the leader also sets who may start a challenge - either anyone can do it right away, or only the leader and deputies, or the other members wait a few minutes after the start (the standard setting). For the first twenty minutes, though, a challenge can always only be started by the cooperative leader or a deputy.
Jokers raise the points for a specific product type
There are four jokers in the game and each of them increases the challenge points for producing one type of product - processing buildings, stables, orchards or soil. On top of that, you can manually activate or restart each joker once per challenge.
In the cooperative Village Fair a joker starts automatically if the cooperative has joker time available for that product type, otherwise a member who buys joker time can switch it on manually. In the solo challenge it works much the same - if you have joker time available, it activates by itself, but a purchased joker you have to start manually. Jokers switch on automatically when a challenge starts and pause themselves again between challenges.
You raise a joker's power with upgrades that you get as a reward for challenge support. Joker time you either buy in the joker shop or produce yourself - if you produce more than the required amount of a given product, you get joker time for the next challenge for free.
Rewards combine the cooperative's performance with your own result
Part of the rewards depends on how your cooperative is doing in the league, others depend purely on how many challenge points you collect yourself. In the cooperative Village Fair you'll come across these types of rewards.
- cooperative hard work reward
- personal hard work reward
- personal performance reward
- cooperative competition reward
In the solo challenge you get a personal event reward instead of the cooperative ones. There's also challenge support - a new type of reward that helps you handle the current challenges and strengthens your jokers at the same time. You only get this reward the first time you play a given challenge, though, not on repeats.
The personal performance reward is only within reach for the best player in a cooperative with at least five members - in bigger cooperatives several players can be rewarded at once.
