Ok, so here's how things went. I played three 2-player games last night, all of which used this stack of Villages. The first one had Rabble, so we build roughly mirror Village-Rabble engines, though there was diversity in the extras we put in and, of course, diversity in the Villages we had to work with. We wound up emptying the Village stack, possibly unwisely, and used every Village at least once. An interesting feature of this game is that we had Haggler to pick up extra Villages with $5 and $6 purchases, but when we turned up Town Hall, we couldn't do that anymore. So Town Hall stayed on top for a while and actually discouraged loading up on Rabbles, as buying a Rabble with a Haggler in play wouldn't allow us to get a free Village to lubricate the deck.
Second game lacked good drawing cards, so the Villages were less important. We bought some but didn't wind up buying a lot.
Third game was the most interesting -- a Colony game with King's Court, Nobles, Fairgrounds, and Colony/Platinum. Spice Merchant and Develop thinned out our decks quicker than you'd think, which left us with rich, junk-free decks and no source of +Buy other than Spice Merchant (which we hand to feed Silvers to, because neither of us had the foresight to save some Coppers) and the Municipality buried in an unknown position in the Villages pile. As we were soon pulling in money sufficient for double- and triple-Colony turns, it was critical to have that +Buy. But when we got through the Villages stack to Trader's Village, it stalled out the pile, because neither of us wanted a trasher and certainly not one that takes up a card slot.
But my opponent managed to put together a ~$9 turn with +Buy from Spice Merchant, and he bought the Trader's Village. What do you know -- Municipality was the next Village in the pile, and so he was able to get that too with his second buy. Now he had a source of +Buy without any strings attached -- one he could King's Court if necessary, and which would turn up in his hand almost every turn, as we were both reliably drawing our whole decks every turn. As it turned out, I won, but only because I'd build up some early momentum that he wasn't able to overcome. If the Colony pile had had a couple more Colonies in it, I'm sure that would have prolonged the game long enough to overtake me.
Some comments on the individual Villages:
Coastal Village - Feels like the weakest one to me. Very often it didn't matter which card I picked, because I had a drawer in hand that would pick up the other two anyway. I'm sure it's better in junk-heavy decks, though, which was not true of any of the three games we played.
Hunter's Village - Very nice. I think my opponent got it all three games. Once he made a bad decision with it, discarding a Village and picking up a green card instead, but usually it was beneficial.
Shipping Village - I played this a lot and only once needed the next-turn +Action. But when I did, it made a huge difference.
Town Hall - The VP never mattered. I had considered bumping it up to 2 VP (too much for a dedicated stack, but probably fine as a unique), but I think it would still only generally be a tie-breaker card. If Coastal isn't the weakest one here, it's this.
Encampment - This is the Shanty Town Plus one. The thing to recognize here is that if you activate the bonus, you probably aren't going to need the extra Actions. It got activated once last night and was helpful, but I think it's more accurate to say it's a "safer" Shanty Town rather than a more powerful one, if that distinction makes sense.
Municipality - The attack never mattered that much, but then I didn't expect it to. This is key when you need the +Buy.
Trader's Village / Outskirts - Rather interestingly, my opponent used this card -- the trasher -- to activate Outskirts' on-trash effect. So even if there is no other trashing available in the kingdom, there is always the chance you'll get both Trader's Village and Outskirts and get to use one on the other. I did consider only a +2 Cards bonus on Outskirts, as was suggested here, but it seemed fine. Outskirts otherwise feels like one of the weaker cards here. The on-gain bonus is not nearly as exciting as it is on Border Village, as very often all you might want at $3 or under is a Silver, and money is somewhat at odds with the kind of decks you want to build with Villages.
One very cool thing, though: When you buy an Outskirts, there's a reasonable chance that the Village underneath it is a $3 Village, and you can pick up that with Outskirts' on-gain effect. That happened once last night.
Prospector's Village - King's Courting this was awesome. One blind draw, and two targeted draws. However, it did whiff a LOT, and one thing I was surprised about was how often it was actively BAD, forcing me to put a Copper or a green card on my deck because that's all there was to choose from! I was pretty happy with the average case, though.
Underground Village - Still not 100% sure that the card limit was the right call here, but I'm slightly more sure than I was. At one point, my opponent had both a Cellar and this in his hand at the same time and had to think about the correct order to play them in (Cellar first). So that was a neat bit of tactical thinking.
