In the Year of the Dragon
Written by Cearbhail on April 21st, 2011In the Year of the Dragon was released in Essen 2008 and proved to be quite a hit among the eurogame crowd, much like the Carcassonne board game was. The core of this board game is quite simple, player with the most victory points wins, and you get victory points by having many palaces, purchasing privileges, hiring geishas (an otherwise useless employee) or using the specific victory point action (an otherwise useless action). What brings a twist to the formula is the fact that while players try to get these nice points a whole lot of horrible stuff descends upon their heads. You have famine, pestilence, war, taxes (worse than death!) and… fireworks festival. Okay, that last one isn’t that much of a threat, but you’ll spend a lot of time preparing for the worst in this board game.
To make matters even more difficult for us chinese administrators, the board game is structured around a rather elegant worker-placement variant. Depending on the quality of the personnel you have on the palace, you get to go first (if you have less efficient people) or last (if you have more productive ones). There’s only one worker per player, one action per turn, and if you choose an action that has already been chosen (or is paired with another action that has been chosen, the only random aspect of the game), you have to pay 3 chinese bucks. Just so you have an idea of how tight money is in this board game, you start the game with 6 bucks and it’s likely you’ll never go pass this. So, it’s expensive to do stuff that has been done before this turn. If there’s nothing even remotely interesting left, you can choose not to do anything and re-set your money to 3 bucks (if you had 0, you go to 3. If you had 2, you also go to 3) so next turn there’s at least the option of paying for something.
What could leave many players confused in the first couple of plays (or at least this was my case) is that this is not a board game of survival: a player that strives to be the one least affected by the disasters will probably lose. The disasters are there not to define the winner, but to keep the players from scoring Vps. The winner is the person who keeps scoring Vps regardless of the disasters. In eight out of the game’s twelve turns you’ll have to deal with a blow that’s about to strike. You’re constantly fighting against a game system that does not seem to be pleased with your existence, or at least your comfort. It’s easy to lose yourself in this fight and forget that your real fight is against the other players, to score more than they do while fighting for survival. It’s damage control, but not to lose the smallest number of personnel, but to lose the smallest amount of scoring capacity, overall.
Thus comes what I see as the only flaw of this board game, or at least the characteristic of the design that pleases me the least: the indirect aspect of the interaction in the game. Don’t get me wrong, this board game definitely has a lot of interaction (specially considering the eurogame average), but it’s essentially one of those games where each player builds his own separate thing and the player that builds the best “thing” wins the match. The interaction is just in the part of getting more stuff for your “thing”, like dozens of other eurogames before it. There’s no messing directly with what other people create or do (just try to keep them from doing what they want). What keeps the game alive is the tightness of the system (the classic “I have one action but I want to do 3 things” problem pops up every turn or so), but it bogs down to how well you now the intricacies of the system (which aren’t really that numerous), with the intricacies of how your opponents play coming at a somewhat distant second place.
One other issue with this board game is the balance. This board game is incredibly well designed and went through very good playtesting, but it may not appear so in your first half dozen matches. There’s one action that a player can take in the beginning that is very strong, rather easy to do and with irreversible benefits, to the point where it was questioned if the game is fair or not. It’s quite possible to beat the player that makes this move, but it requires experienced players. Thus, in a rather unusual way for a eurogame, balance relies mostly on the players, and on game experience. It could be frustrating for the first couple of games, but after a while players understand what’s going on.
This board game scales from 2 to 5, but the 3 player game would be only for beginners. Four or five is the way to go (though full quorum might be too rough for a first go). The two-player game is probably very stale, I’ve never played it and suspect I never will. The number of unblocked options would be too numerous for the biggest interaction of the game (blocking) become as relevant as it should. The machine-building aspect of the board game (not the most interesting part) would be too strong.
I’ve played this board game around fifteen times (some of them online, at Mabiweb) and I’ve always had fun, though the game’s starting to get just a little bit repetitive. This is not something to be played obsessively: even though the random order of the disasters during setup keeps one match different from another, after a while it becomes clear that some disasters weigh more than others, and are the ones you should really focus your construction around. There’s a tiny expansion coming out in a Alea-anniversary box (bundled together with a bunch of expansions for games I don’t own), but from a quick glance at the rules, I imagine it adds some nice variety to this board game.
Some of these fifteen matches have been quite memorable: a come-from-behind victory by the third player by just a single victory point, or one where everyone played very poorly and a “money-acumulation strategy” (a non-strategy, by all rational means) won the game. Even though it’s a machine-building board game, the tightness keeps the interaction high, and the disasters keep everyone at the table interested and laughing. There is no laugh like when you laugh at somebody else’s misery. Because of this cruel element, non board gamers should probably proceed with caution, even though a player does have a good chance at doing well in his first match, if he’s experienced in eurogames and pays enough attention.
Overall, I rate In the Year of the Dragon a 7.5/10. My love of damage control decisions keeps this one in my collection. Some players around here do not like the idea of having to lose so many resources to plagues and such (they prefer to build stuff that remains built, as they say), but overall the reception of this board game in my group has been good. Frustration factor can be high, due to the cruelty of the system, so the 12+ age recommendation is probably wise, but with four or five players and 75-100 minutes, it’s definitely one of the better board games out there.
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