At the Gates of Loyang is the latest release from Uwe Rosenberg and the first release from Hall Games, a new company formed to apparently pick up the leftovers from Uwe's creative genius that get declined by Lookout Games.
While fans of Uwe have been eagerly awaiting this game, it has not received the kind of OMG! buzz that Stronghold, Dungeon Lords, and Endeavor have been receiving. But it’s been very high on my radar screen, and apart from Dungeon Lords and the Agricola expansion, it is the game I have been most eagerly awaiting. It is only now starting to hit the shores out here in the gaming backwaters of the USA, but I had a chance to play it several times at Euroquest and have since grabbed myself a copy to play even more.
In reviewing games, I prefer not to rehash the rules, but since it is new and scarce, I will cover the highlights. I prefer to address what I like or dislike about the game, while providing enough context for the reader to make sense of my meaning. For those who prefer the rules to set that context, they are available online here.
I. Gameplay Overview
Loyang plays over 9 identical rounds. Prior to the first round, players need to buy 1 of 3 available veggies to plant in their home field. Then the first round starts. In each round, there are 3 phases:
1) Harvest (players receive one new field and harvest vegetables from their fields),
2) Card phase (players each play 2 Action cards, then a new Starting player is chosen), and
3) Action phase (players buy and sell vegetables, then score victory points)
In the Harvest phase you remove one vegetable from each planted field and “plow” a new field - a new card from your 8-card shuffled pile of private fields. Your first field, the “home” field, acts as a timer to countdown the rounds. You remove the 9th vegetable to signal the last round. Cards and actions can never affect the home field. Fully harvested fields get removed.
In the Card phase the deck and discards are reshuffled and four cards are dealt to each player. This is a confusing phase for some players, but it is essentially a card draft, something that many people wish had been incorporated into the official rules for Agricola. This is an important mechanic for the game.
At some point in this phase each player must “play” 1 card from their hand, and 1 card from the common pile. For the first player, the common pile is empty, so they must “discard” one of their cards to start the pile. Then, every subsequent player must either a) “play” (1 from hand, 1 from pile) or b) “discard” 1 to the common pile. Once a player has “played,” they must “discard” their remaining cards to the common pile. Once all but one player has played, the last player can no longer discard, and is forced to play. This is where turn order is set. The last player to play is the new start player, and the second-to-last becomes the second player. IMO, this phase is really where the game is won or lost. If you miss out taking a valuable card, such as a specific customer you need, you can get can fall behind.
In his recent review , crobledo does a great job discussing the type of cards.
Quote:
Before we move on, let's talk about the 5 types of cards:
1. Markets - These are the orange cards. Markets will allow you to trade any veggie for one of the three veggies displayed on the card. The rate of trade is either 1:1 or 2:1. When you obtain a market, place the 3 veggies available to you on the card to remind you of the supply. Once you have traded for all 3 veggies on the card, you discard it.
2. Helpers - These are the white cards. Each helper has a different ability. They are all one-time use, and are discarded as soon as they are used. Any helpers that reference "other player" mean your partner in the action phase. Helpers that affect other players also have a purple lantern symbol to remind you and others of that fact.
3. Regular Customers - These are the blue cards. Regular customers have to be supplied with their desired veggies every single round, for 4 rounds, or suffer a -2 coin penalty. All of them want 2 veggies every round, but the veggies they want varies as well as the cash you get. Whenever you get a regular customer, you also place on it a satisfaction token, on the happy side. The first round you fail to supply a regular customer with their vegetables, you turn it over to sad instead of paying the 2 coin.
4. Casual Customers - These are the red cards. They all want 3 veggies, and when you fulfill their order they pay you the money on the card and then are discarded. Like the regular customers, the amount of cash you get is based on the rarity of the veggies they want. Additionally, whenever you fulfill a casual customer's order, you need to look at how many regular customers you have out. If you have the same amount, you get paid the face value of the casual customer. If you have MORE casuals than regulars, you get 2 coin less. If you have MORE regular than casuals, then you get 2 coin more.
5. Extra fields - These are the green cards. They work the exact same way as your private fields, but cost 2 coin when you obtain the card. They go up by your revealed fields, and can be planted and harvested just like regular fields.
1. Markets - These are the orange cards. Markets will allow you to trade any veggie for one of the three veggies displayed on the card. The rate of trade is either 1:1 or 2:1. When you obtain a market, place the 3 veggies available to you on the card to remind you of the supply. Once you have traded for all 3 veggies on the card, you discard it.
2. Helpers - These are the white cards. Each helper has a different ability. They are all one-time use, and are discarded as soon as they are used. Any helpers that reference "other player" mean your partner in the action phase. Helpers that affect other players also have a purple lantern symbol to remind you and others of that fact.
3. Regular Customers - These are the blue cards. Regular customers have to be supplied with their desired veggies every single round, for 4 rounds, or suffer a -2 coin penalty. All of them want 2 veggies every round, but the veggies they want varies as well as the cash you get. Whenever you get a regular customer, you also place on it a satisfaction token, on the happy side. The first round you fail to supply a regular customer with their vegetables, you turn it over to sad instead of paying the 2 coin.
4. Casual Customers - These are the red cards. They all want 3 veggies, and when you fulfill their order they pay you the money on the card and then are discarded. Like the regular customers, the amount of cash you get is based on the rarity of the veggies they want. Additionally, whenever you fulfill a casual customer's order, you need to look at how many regular customers you have out. If you have the same amount, you get paid the face value of the casual customer. If you have MORE casuals than regulars, you get 2 coin less. If you have MORE regular than casuals, then you get 2 coin more.
5. Extra fields - These are the green cards. They work the exact same way as your private fields, but cost 2 coin when you obtain the card. They go up by your revealed fields, and can be planted and harvested just like regular fields.
The Action phase is where most players will spend their time focusing, and it probably takes the most time. The Action phase is done one player at a time, starting with the new start player (except in 4-player which is played 2 players at a time). You can do several things in the action phase:
- Sow unplanted fields with a vegetable. Like Agricola, you need to have the first vegetable on your cart to plant one, the rest come from the supply for free.
- Buy and sell vegetables at your local shop – the rules state that this is “your own shop” but it makes explanation easier if you consider it “your local shop” instead. Otherwise, the buying and selling bits don’t make much sense.
- Trade vegetables at your local market stands - either 1:1 or 1:2 depending on the particular card
- Play or discard a helper card – the helper cards are one-time use tactical cards that give you special powers once played. When you take advantage of a helper card, you must discard it, so the powers are not persistent.
- Buy more cards (what the rules call a two pack) – very powerful action, since almost all the cards are valuable, especially the extra fields. Getting more cards is a key to victory. However, the more of some type of cards you have the higher the cost to buy additional ones.
- Deliver to customers for cash – this is where you make your money. You have two types of customers: regular and casual. A regular customer must be satisfied in four successive rounds starting immediately. If you fail to satisfy them once, they become angry. If you fail to satisfy an already angry customer, then you must pay 2 coins. So creating a stable supply of certain types of vegetables is crucial to being to effectively meet demand for your customers. Casual customers can be served at any time and can sometimes be very lucrative, but the game rewards players who have more regular than casual customers.
At the end of the Action phase, you store any leftovers, pending space available, and move up the VP track (the “Path of Prosperity”). This is the scoring mechanic people have been talking about. The VP track goes from 1 to 20. Each turn, you get to move up 1 point for 1 coin. If you want to move up more, you must pay the cost on the next space, e.g., to go from 18 to 19 would cost 1 coin, but to go from 18 to 20 would cost 21 (1+20) coins. Obviously, you never want to miss going up a step, and it’s cheaper to try to get a lead early than it is later. But for every bit of lead you have, subsequent moves cost you more. At any time in the game, you are free to take out loans which give you 5 coins, but for every loan you take, you must move back 1 space at the end of the game. So a loan will cost you about 12 coins at the end – see this post for more details on loan cost calculations.
II. Interesting decisions
I consider myself primarily a strategy gamer, therefore I assess games mostly on what kind and how many interesting decisions I get to make in the course of a game. In Loyang, the decisions are almost completely tactical, as you rarely to never have the capability to nor need for strategic planning. With a couple of exceptions, almost all of your actions are re-actions:
-React to the “plowed” field. Your fields have been shuffled and flipped over, so you do not know ahead of time what field will turn up, and the better vegetables require the smaller fields. Do you waste that 3-plot field with a cheap vegetable because you need it now? Or do you buy a leek to plant and hope for a leek-y customer? The one exception is the tenant-farmer card, who can be very powerful. As part of using his power, you get to look at the order of your private fields, and so you can actually develop a planting strategy that will optimize your garden. But you can’t depend on this card showing always showing up for your benefit.
-React to the Card draft. If someone discards a card that will benefit you, you take it. If you don’t take it, then you may or may not see it again in time for it to be useful. Ultimately, this is where I think the most important decisions occur. The card draft is the single most important point of player interaction and is when you can deny a player ahead of you the cards he need to get his engine going.
-React to 2-packs. If you don’t get what you need from the draft, you can hope to get it from the deck directly. Most of the cards will be helpful, but occasionally, it can be a wasted action. It’s not really a decision though; you generally want to take advantage of the 2-pack buy option each turn if you can afford it. But what you do with those cards will be a complete reaction to what you get.
-React to customers. You can’t make money if you don’t have customers, so you will want to grab the ones that show up as soon as possible, even if none of them fit your current crops. It’s lucky to grab a regular customer early that you can deliberately plant for on the first turn. Otherwise you need to plant and hope to grab a lucky draw customer to serve later. This is another reason why the card draft is so vital to your success.
-React to the occasional player interaction. Occasionally you will have the opportunity to screw with another player. In those cases, you can choose generally choose who to interact with. It’s possible to really hurt a player if you trade away their veggies, or if you swipe their critical casual customer. In the four-player game, the starting and second player after the Card phase get to choose a partner who they will interact with (this is to speed up the 4-player game, since both pairs can now play simultaneously). But again, this is not a strategic decision, it’s a tactical one that is primarily a reaction to what you want or what you want to avoid.
-React to the VP buy. There’s not much decision here. As long as you have some customers, you buy as many points as you can each turn. There’s no reason to hoard your money, the points just get more expensive each turn.
The only two real strategic decisions that you face in this game are: what to plant at the beginning (Ralph claims the initial choices are balanced) and whether to take a loan or not (in general, don't!).
II. Pros. Here are the things I like about it
+ Should be appealing to new players. This game will likely have instant appeal for most people, which means it will be easy to get it to the table for people to try. On the surface, it’s a simple game about buying, trading, planting and harvesting vegetables, and ultimately, selling those vegetables for profit. The beautiful, colorful artwork and wonderful vegimeeples add to theme to make it look very fun.
+ Remains true to its theme. The game is easy to teach new players since the concept of planting and harvesting is pretty simple and very thematic. Everyone can “get” how this works pretty quickly. You also have customers, both regular and casual, that you must satisfy for profit. This also fits with the theme and is easy for people to connect with. As a counterpoint, the helper cards, and the card distribution mechanic are not all that thematic, but on the whole, I think this game remains true to its harvest theme. I think I could probably get Grandma to play this game (if they have it in stock in Heaven) since she loved gardening and the vegimeeples are so cute.
+ Scales well from 1-4 players. Because the game is largely a solitary affair (see Cons below), with some limited player interaction, it will play almost identically regardless of the number of players you have. From the solitaire game (yes, like Agricola and Le Havre, this plays well solo) to four players. Another positive/negative aspect of the game is that the time required does not scale linearly with the number of players. (See Cons below)
+ Is a meatier game with Jambo flavor. Jambo is a great game about buying and selling sets of goods. If you have played Jambo, you may sense some immediate similarities. I usually describe Loyang as “Diner Dash meets Jambo.” For those who have not heard of Diner Dash, it is a computer game where players must rush around to produce food to meet the needs of customers who enter their store. The regular customer mechanic feels very much like this. Edit: Some additional comments related to my comparison to Jambo (reposted from another thread). In Jambo, you are completely at the mercy of your card draws. Not so in Loyang. In Loyang, you get to determine what you grow, so if you get your customers first, you can arrange to meet their demand. In Jambo, I felt that getting an early extra market stall is huge. I don't see any huge imbalances in Loyang. Also, the animal cards can really screw you over. In Loyang, it's possible to get screwed over, but it's never major, and only because you did not play tactically to avoid it.
+ Is a pleasantly mild brain-burner. It’s not a really heavy strategy. It’s a medium-heavy tactical game. Almost all of the decisions are reactionary (see below) as you try to puzzle out the best way to satisfy your customers and make money. It’s not too heavy and not too light.
III. Cons. Here are the things that bother me a little
- It has limited interaction. During the Card phase, there is plenty of interaction. It is a card draft after all. And despite it's perceived clunkiness, this is where the real decisions are made. However, people won't really notice, because is generally pretty quick. However, during the Action phase, the game can be almost entirely solitaire play. Sure, there is the potential for interaction, for making use of another player’s customers, market stands, helpers, and fields, and it’s the potential for interaction that forces the turns to be sequential, and those require the helper cards. In reality, most of your actions will be done solo. IMO, the game would be better served by just eliminating the Action phase interaction and making the turns simultaneous (since it would speed up the game), or forcing any interactive actions to be done first, so that players could then get on with their own turns. This would reduce game length dramatically, especially for a 3-player game. As it is, the low level of interaction makes it feel that it…
- Is more of a puzzle than a game. The winner will be the player who satisfied his customers in the most efficient manner, not because he “chose a better strategy.” This is probably just a personal preference – a puzzle game can be great, too – but I prefer games with heavier strategic elements. Because of that, the game feels, like it…
- Can be a bit long. This game takes a surprising amount of time to play. 9 rounds is a lot once you get going. It seems to take about 60-90 minutes to play this, even 2-player. 3-player takes even longer, since the Action phase is done one-at-a-time. 4-player is closer to 2-player in length. The card draft will take longer and you have an extra “partnering” decision to make, but the two pairs of players can play simultaneously which makes it faster than 3-players. These are estimates from our games, but 1-player takes about 45-60 minutes, 2-player takes about 60-90, 3-player 80-110, and 4-player 70-100. New players will take even longer as they will be reading the card text (and rules appendix) to figure out what the cards do and when they can be used.
- It’s not as deep as I would have liked. Since it’s more of a tactical optimization puzzle, there’s not much strategic depth here. There are some apparent no-brainer moves that you really need to be making on your turns – like only buying vegetables to plant, regularly buying 2-packs, regular customers satisfied, trading for other players’ leeks, etc., – but apart from that, it’s all in the card draft. There’s the possibility for some really valuable card combinations, but those are all tactical decisions (see below)
- It has very tight scoring. Regardless of how poorly or how well you play, you will probably have about the same number of points as everyone else. The VP scoring mechanic acts as a very slight brake on the leader and enables catch-up by laggards. So the game seems to frequently come down to the tie-breaker (remaining money). Even the rule book supports how narrow the scoring is: for the solo game, the performance rage extending from “good” to “master” is a mere 2 points. So this game is all about eking out a tiny advantage in your little garden. This may not be to some people’s taste.
- It could benefit from a centralized score track. The individual player boards are a bit fiddly and busy, and it is easy to bump your player token off the track as you lean in to snatch a leek from your hapless opponent. So far, a bumped token has happened in every game we’ve played. There’s no game memory to be able to recalculate the scores, so you need to remember where you were when that happens. Also, it’s difficult to actually see where all the other players are, although that’s not really vital since you should be moving up as much as you can each turn. A common “race track” would have mechanically been more efficient, if less thematic. I understand the rationale for the T-shaped board and all, but it wasn’t necessary.
- It’s more expensive than it needed to be. You may be one of those who say components shouldn’t factor into price, but there are plenty of people out there who think they should. And in a tight economy, people want to ensure they are getting their money’s worth. It’s no different than the pricing of a book with 1000 pages versus one with only 100. This game is expensive for what you get. It’s essentially some vegimeeples and a deck of cards for $75. Now, before the righteous get all ugly with me about this, consider Ralph’s own comments regarding the game price. If this had been published by Lookout, it probably would have been a lot cheaper. Hopefully, if rumors are to be trusted, it may get picked up by Z-man, and Zev may be able to offer it at a better price point.
IV. Conclusion
Despite my frank discussion of the cons, At the Gates of Loyang is a great game which I will probably enjoy for some time. It’s one of the rare games that's got me fascinated. I have already been digging in, analyzing the veggie distributions on the customers, and trying to determine the best initial veggie – I’m assuming they are NOT balanced. – and it's kept me engaged enough to spend time reviewing it. I take that as a good sign.
This has also spurred some serious solo play, which I enjoyed with Agricola, but did not really get into with Le Havre. So for those solo fliers out there, this should be enjoyable.
I would have preferred a heavier game, on the order of Agricola, but this one is very fun to play and it's great that 9 year old daughter enjoys playing it as well.
My initial “hype rating” (based on Agricola and Le Havre) was an automatic 10, but after playing it a lot, I will probably settle on a 9.
(9/10)Edit: Player count: Loyang probably plays best with 2. The 4 player game is almost identical to the 2, since you only play "against" a single partner. It's probably worse with 3, only because of the doubled downtime watching the two players take their action phases instead of just one.
Last edited on 2009-11-20 23:19:48 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Sat Nov 21, 2009 1:04 am
At the end of the day, I might be tempted 
