As a gamer whose primary gaming group consists of himself and one other player, I value games that have good 2-player variants for them. Many games advertise that they are good for two players but fail to deliver. In the Year of the Dragon is one them.

Game Play
Briefly, the game mechanisms have players stocking their palaces with servants to fend off crises looming on the horizon. However, there is always a scarcity of resources with which to fend them off. At the same time, players must not only avoid the consequences of the the crises, but also earn victory points with which to win the game.

A game turn looks something like this:

Action
Players take actions that either help them to earn VPs (building new palaces, collecting fixed VP incomes, doing research), help them to ward off the crises (make fireworks, earn money, grow rice) or minimally affect the game (maybe change the turn order). Actions are selected from a group, somewhat like role selection in PR, except when a player selects one action in a group, the whole group becomes occupied.

Hire a Worker
Since the actions are dependent on the workers you hire, you are always hiring workers in advance to improve the actions above at a later time in the game. Some of your workers will die. That's ok.

Avert the Crisis
This is what you've hired your workers for and taken actions for. If you're prepared for this crisis, it generally means that you can take a free action earlier in the the turn to earn victory points.

Score VPs
At the end of each turn, everyone counts up their VPs and scores them. If you're behind just one point at the end of each turn, you will be behind 12 points by the end of the game.

Why this game isn't particularly enjoyable
The game lacks tension because, early in the game, one player tends to get a lead over the other and then is able to exploit that lead for the rest of the game. After six turns, the tension is lost and, with six turns to go, both players have a pretty solid understanding of who will win. As a result, the game isn't worth playing for more than six turns. The follow comments explain why this game becomes boring for both the winner and the loser rather quickly.

Variable Turn Order
Turn order in the game is determined often by who is doing the best in the game. For example, there's a crap action that a player can take in order to advance his ability to go first. However, a player who is behind in points is usually spending his efforts trying to get VPs to catch up or avert the coming crisis. A player in the lead can solidify his position as the first player in a turn by selecting this action just once at the right moment in the game (or twice, if at the wrong moment). While the person going first generally lacks the ability to hire more experienced workers, this only arises once or twice in a game with potential consequences. Likely, that player will be able face the consequence of the crisis without losing as much as the player in second does during most of the rest of the game. In other words, the advantage conferred to the first player is not balanced by the disadvantage that it carries with it.

Actions are grouped
The seven actions are grouped into two piles in a two player game. After the person who goes first selects an action, if the player going second wishes to take any of the actions in the same group as the first player, he must pay an exorbitant amount of Yuan (money) in order to do so. This punishes the loser even more by causing him to spend precious money to take actions simply because he is not in the lead. While being in the lead VP wise and having the start player lead are not directly tied to one another, my opponent and I have noticed that they tend to be correlated. As a result, the player in second place tends to start out close in VPs but then gradually fall behind as the game progresses.

Punish the Loser
This is an exciting mechanism to introduce to a genre of games that tend to shy away from hurting players. Most Euro games do not have a "punish the loser" mechanism. In the Year of the Dragon does and it is part of the downside of this game. Like Risk, it is very difficult for the little guy to get back into the game (because it's smart gameplaying to eliminate him). It is hard for the player in last place to get into first in a second player game because the advantage given to the player in the lead is too powerful to be overcome.

In the Year of the Dragon looks like it will be much more fun to play with four or five players. However, unlike Samurai or Race for the Galaxy, it does not reduce itself to 2 players particularly well and retain the same level of tension. We have not tried our own home grown variants for In the Year of the Dragon, however, I will share some ideas to make 2-player more fun.

1 Remove the soldiers, the mongol invasion and the parade action from the game (playing just 10 turns). This will make the fight for who goes first a little closer. The other option to remedy this situation is to have a "governor" effect and the player order rotates, disregarding the person track.

2 Decrease the cost of taking an action after the first player to either 2 or 1 yuan so that the second player doesn't get hosed by a clever/lucky opponent.

3 On the sixth turn, allow the player going second to hire an experienced worker if they would otherwise be hiring an inexperienced worker.

If you have any suggestions to help balance this game for 2-players or any experiences, please post them.