So it looks like everyone wants brackets. But how should they be organized? I'm willing to prepare something like this, but I need some more details, because currently without any details I can't really do anything. Any ideas are welcome. I do enjoy making these polls, and brackets sound fun.
Just to make sure you know, I'm pretty sure Donald and the others were kidding when they said they wanted brackets.
OTOH, if we do do brackets, we should have good players play each other with two villages in the kingdom, and one player is only allowed to use one village, and the other player uses the other village...
I'm not sure that's a good comparison. It's hard to compare say, Nobles and Hamlet, because of their dramatically different price points. Also, some villages are close enough that the winning player will probably be determined more by strategy choice and shuffle luck than by the superiority of the village.
Also, the village's utility will be determined by the kingdom. Fishing village is obviously stronger than Vanilla Village in kingdoms with Watchtower or Library as the only source of draw. Squire might be more useful because you can trash it get Familiars or Goons than from any ability to enable an engine. Fortress is pretty weak on boards without trashing, but can be the centerpiece of a winning strategy with Bishop on the board.
Thus, on a given board, forcing one player to go for a particular village rather than another might tip the game to one of the players regardless of the village's overall value.
A better idea would be to have the players play two identical kingdoms, one with one village and one with the other, without any cards that will have a particularly strong interaction with one village versus the other (I.e. don't compare Hamlet to Squire when Tunnel is on the board, or when trashing + strong attacks are available). Then compare how quickly the winning player won, the margin of victory, etc to see which produced the more efficient engine.