Imagine a small, neglected hovel somewhere in ancient China. This hovel is the home of a young idealistic man; a man who spent his childhood caring for his elderly, decrepit parents. Moved by their plight, he has devoted the rest of his life to the art of medicine. He works tirelessly, caring for the sick and bringing healing where there was once only death. He lives in poverty, for his untiring devotion to his cause has left him no time for anything other than the saving of lives. In short, he is the rarest of rare things - a good man. Now imagine this good man leaving his home in the early morning, for yet another day crusading for health. He notices straight away that it sure is quiet. But before he can even utter the words "Where the heck is everybody?" he sees - in the distance but getting rapidly closer and closer - a ravening horde of Mongol horsemen. Perhaps now may be a good time to retreat to the confines of the inner city? But as he turns he notices that the gates to the inner city are barred. Soldiers line the walls, preparing for the battle to come. The young healer sees the Governor of the city watching him from a balcony (yes, the same Governor who hired him to combat that plague a couple of months ago). The Governor shrugs, mouths the word 'Sorry' and turns to enter his opulent palace, filled with Courtesans and fireworks. The healer mouths something back.

Such is Stefan Feld's In The Year of the Dragon. At first glance you would be forgiven for thinking that this is a typical Euro game. The box art features happy-looking elderly Chinese men. Sure, there's a soldier on one of the sides but even he's looking pretty pleased with himself - almost as if he were thinking "It's a great life being a soldier in a Euro game. I contribute Victory Points without ever having to risk my life for anything!". In short, you look at the box and think that this is a game where no-one dies, upsetting people is forbidden by the rules and the winner is probably going to be the guy who is the first to build a wall around his rice factory or something like that. They you open the box and...BAM!

In The Year of the Dragon is like a child's jack-in-the-box where someone has swapped the puppet inside for a dagger that squirts acid. The real name of this game should be In The Year of the Dragon You Get Kicked in the Nuts. Repeatedly. It's brutal. I play this game and I have a lot of fun, but when I finish I feel like I've just defused a bomb or something. Why should I have to take a break from playing a Euro game to wipe the sweat from my forehead? Playing this game is like buying a bunny rabbit for your children and then waking up in the morning to find out that it's set fire to all of your shoes.

In The Year of the Dragon is also misleading in its ultimate focus. Remember that jack-in-the-box analogy I made in the paragraph above? Well, imagine if the dagger had a sign on it that said "I am an apple". In The Year of the Dragon pretends to be something that it's not. When you first play it you would be forgiven for thinking that it's nothing more than a crisis management game. You have to manage your palaces and your hirelings to minimise the amount of damage that is going to come your way in the Worst Year in History (I can accept one famine a year, but two? That's just really bad agricultural management. Never mind. The guy who screwed up is probably going to be dead by month eight anyway). And maybe you do this really well. You minimise your loses and keep your people alive - confident that raking in the VPs at the end of the game will be enough to reward you for your just and gracious management style. Then you lose to the guy who spent all his time producing fireworks and laughed as his monks starved to death. Managing the disasters is not enough. You also need to be proactive and find the time and resources to engage in actions that earn VPs during the game. The problem is that the in-game actions that earn you VPs tend to have to be carried out at the expense of the things that a good ruler should be doing to mitigate the coming Plague. In other words, if you want to win at In The Year of the Dragon, you are going to have to make some hard choices and probably send innocent Meeples to their death. In this sense, In The Year of the Dragon is art imitating life. In the games that I play, it's often the players with appalling Human Rights records that fill the top places. It's hard to not to see parallels between this game and modern China, but this review is probably not the place for political commentary - no matter how insightful and satirical.

Despite the brutal nature of this game, I've found it surprisingly Newbie friendly. There's a lot to take in, and an early common mistake is to focus on the Dragon Festival coming in turn three while ignoring the Tribute coming in turn four, but because this game minimises luck and provides plenty of options it's hard for someone with a little strategy nous to fall totally out of the running. In one recent game, one new player took an early lead but realised by about turn seven that he had failed to prepare adequately for the coming disasters and devoted his remaining to time to pursuing a 'Research' strategy. He finally finished a respectable second. The fact that he didn't finish first is also proof (if it were needed) that the game rewards those who do plan ahead successfully.

It's a game that makes you work hard for those VPs, but has the satisfying result of making you feel like you earned your placing. It's one of those games where you feel that you've achieved something significant even if you finish second. In picking your new employees, the game forces the player to choose between maximising effectiveness and going first (which is more useful than you'd think it would be) and it's a very nice dynamic. There are a healthy mix of strategies and tactics which make for some interesting games. Above all, it's a lot of fun. More fun than you'd think it would be. It's rewarding, enjoyable and generates a fair amount of good-natured joking about another player's inability to cope with something as trivial as a Mongol Invasion. In other words, it's a great game.

Sure, there are some obvious winning strategies - such as the early purchase of a 6-Yuan Privilege - but I've found that people want to play again to try something different each time. Furthermore, the random placing of the monthly crises and actions prevent a repeatable pattern of victory. Just don't think that you can finish any higher than third by being 'nice'. If you want to do well in In The Year of the Dragon then you're just going to have to accept it. At some point a young widow is going to have to tell her children that daddy isn't coming home because you deemed him expendable.