A fearsome dragon is threatening to burn all the villages in the kingdom! Luckily dragons are greedy, so if you can bribe him with treasures from the battlefield like a barbarian's axe or a phoenix feather, you might persuade him to spare your village. Unfortunately, other villagers in the kingdom have the same idea. Who can best time their bribes to ensure their treasures are most valued by the dragon when the game comes to an end?

In Please Don't Burn My Village!, which is set in the world of Castle Panic, you want to bribe with the right treasure at the right time to keep the dragon's attention — while buying treasures at the black market and cursing the other villagers' treasures. When no treasure remains, the dragon will burn all of the villages except one. Will yours be the one that survives?

In more detail, players hold a hand of treasure cards that they can use to 1) bribe the dragon, 2) buy more treasure cards from the black market, or 3) draw a treasure card. When they bribe the dragon, they place the cards in sets in front of them, move the token up in value in the dragon's favor, and deal more cards into the black market.

If they instead choose to buy at the black market, they pay from their hand the number of cards indicated on a black market stall, take the cards from that stall into their hand, and move down a treasure in the dragon's favor that matches one of the cards they used to buy their cards. The number of spaces a player moves a token up (when bribing the dragon) or down (when buying at the black market) equals the number cards played. If players don't want to affect the values in the dragon's favor or are out of cards, they can simply draw a card.

The game features a push-your-luck ending: every time someone bribes the dragon, cards are turned over and placed in the black market spaces until a matching card or wild is revealed. When no card is found and the deck runs out, the game ends, play stops and players add any cards in their hand to bribes that match cards they previously played. The player with the highest score wins, sparing their village from disaster.