Main Catalogue |  BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES |  Rio Grande Games |  In the Year of the Dragon

In the Year of the Dragon Price: £33.99 Board Game; 2-5 Players; Ages 12+ by Rio Grande Games In this game, each player takes on the role of a Chinese prince, seeking tomaximize the prosperity and prestige of his province in the ancient Chinaof approximately 1,000 A.D. To assist in these endeavors, the princesmust call upon the diverse talents of their courtiers, from scholars andmonks to warriors and craftsmen. These loyal subjects will lend theirexpertise to the struggle to shield their rulers from the often disastrousconsequences of the myriad untoward events that plague the populacefrom month to month. Be it drought, contagion or Mongol invasion,only foresight and planning will spare the princes and their subjects fromthese fates.The better a player can manage his province and withstand the seeminglyunending onslaught of hazardous events, the more honor and victorypoints he will have to show for it in the end. ++++++++++++++++++++ Counter magazine review ++++++++++++++++++++ 2-5 players, 75-100 minutes designed by Stefan Feld reviewed by Stuart Dagger I remember being very impressed the first time I came across the Chinese saying, ``May you live in interesting times\'\'. It is polite, elegant and the icy malevolence is carefully placed just below the surface. My guess is that Stefan Feld was also impressed, because the sardonic and cynical view of the world that underlies the choice of the word ``interesting\'\' seems to have been the inspiration for this latest game in Alea\'s ``big box\'\' series. The setting is China around a thousand years ago, and the challenge it sets players is to cope as best they can with a series of events - most of them bad - which they know are going to happen. There are twelve event tiles - two each of peace, pestilence, festivals, famine, Imperial tribute and Mongol invasion. One will be enacted in each round and at the start of the game they are laid out in a row. The peace tiles go in positions 1 and 2; the others are assigned randomly. The concession that the game system makes is that these tiles are all placed face up, so that you know what is going to happen when. It\'s clearly not very realistic to tell people in advance that there will be a famine on turns 5 and 8 (say), but it works in game terms. With the event tiles face-down, the game would be a lottery; as it is you can plan ahead. The planning will not be easy, because there is too much to do and other players get in the way, but at least you can make the attempt. Your role is that of a provincial governor and your aim is to get into your entourage a group of specialists, whose skills will mitigate the effects of the disasters generated by the event tiles, and whose presence will bring you wealth and prestige. The specialists available are craftsmen builders, court ladies, pyrotechnists, tax collectors, warriors, monks, healers, farmers and scholars. You begin with two 2-storey palaces (all your people will need to be housed), 6 yuan (nothing like enough) and two specialists of your choice. The two specialists you choose must be of different types, and in order to set each player on a different path, no two players may choose exactly the same pair. Each round has 4 phases: actions, recruitment, event, scoring. The action phase is controlled by a set of 7 cards and at the start of the round these are shuffled and divided, as evenly as possible, into as many piles as there are players. In turn order each player then selects one of the piles and executes one of the actions from that pile. The seven possibilities are taxes (collect money), build (increase the accommodation space in your palaces), harvest (collect rice tiles), fireworks display (collect fireworks tiles), military parade (score VP for your warriors), research (score VP for your scholars) and ``privilege\'\' (buy a tile which will give you VP each round). In all cases bar the last, how much you get will depend on the number and power of the specialists you have of the appropriate type. For example, with ``build\'\' you get ``palace floors\'\', which you use to either extend existing palaces (up to a maximum height of 3 floors each) or create new ones, and the number you get is equal to 1 plus the number of craftsmen builders in your entourage. Selecting a pile is free provided no one else has already chosen it, but if one or more players got there before you, it will cost you 3 yuan. Since money is tight, this makes turn order important, a fact the game exploits by making it something players fight over. In Phase 2 you recruit a new person to your court. At the start of the game you have a set of 11 cards, one for each of the 9 specialisms and two wild cards. Play the appropriate card and pick up a tile for the corresponding specialist. In the case of the craftsmen/builders, the tax collectors and the court ladies all the tiles in the set are the same, but with the other six you have a choice of two types. At least, you will for the early part of the game. The two types are ``senior\'\' and ``junior\'\', and the senior will be twice as good at what he does. However, the choice isn\'t quite as simple as that makes it sound, for this is where the question of how turn order is decided comes in. Each person tile has a number on it and in the middle of the board there is a track on which everyone records the sum of the numbers on the person tiles they have taken. Turn order is decided by your position on the track. The further along you are, the earlier you come in the turn order. So it won\'t surprise you to learn that the numbers on the ``junior\'\' tiles are bigger than those on their senior equivalents. Each new recruit requires accommodation and the rule is one person per palace floor. If you don\'t have space for the new person, you still have to play a card and take a tile, but must then discard someone - which may or may not be the one you have just recruited. Doing this is to be avoided if at all possible, for not only do you lose the services of the person released, you will also lose the points they would have been worth at the end of the game. Phase 3 is the enactment of the event. In the first two rounds the peace tile means that nothing happens. Thereafter every round gives you something to worry about. With pestilence the threat is the loss of three people and to stave this off you need healers. A senior healer will save two people and a junior will save one. So to escape without loss you need at least two healer tiles, but remember that there was only one card for each specialism in your initial set. The only way you can get two is either by making a junior healer one of your initial choices (both your initial choices have to be juniors) or by using one of your wild cards. But of course you are under similar pressures in other categories as well. As I said earlier, you know what events are coming and when, but that still leaves you too much to do. Planning is vital, but you will also have to make choices. To fend off famine you need 1 rice token for each of your palaces and each one that you are short will cost you a person. A similar penalty awaits those who can\'t pay the Imperial tribute. His demand is 4 yuan and you lose a person for each yuan you can\'t pay. The other two don\'t pose quite as bad a threat. Here the worry is about losing ground to your opponents on the victory point track. In the case of the festivals the players with the most fireworks tokens gain victory points - though it will cost them some of the fireworks tokens they have (presumably this represents the fireworks they used in the display they were chosen to give). The Mongol invasions give victory points to everyone who has warriors, but with a ``lose one person\'\' penalty to whoever has fewest. The round ends with everyone scoring points - 1 per palace, 1 per court lady and either 1 or 2 for each privilege tile (depending on whether you bought the dear one or the cheap one). The game ends at the end of the 12th round and there is then a final scoring: 2 points per person in your entourage, chunky bonuses for the monks (who hitherto have done nothing apart from take up space) and fractions of points for any remaining rice tiles, firework tiles and yuan in your possession. In the Year of the Dragon is an interesting and original game with a good story line. Last Spring the same author\'s Notre Dame produced headlines along the lines of ``the Alea big box line is back\'\' - the general view being that numbers 8, 9 and 10 in the series hadn\'t been up to the standard of 1 to 7. With this, which is number 12, he has maintained the level he reached with number 11. Components are much as you would expect from an Alea game apart from the board, which is a bit thinner than we are used to and which doesn\'t lie properly flat. This is almost certainly because they have shifted production from Germany (where they know the secret of making boards that lie flat) to the Czech Republic (where seemingly they don\'t). I understand the economic realities of globalisation, but why does it so often seem to be a case of the cheap driving out the good? However, though the matter is one that I find irritating, you shouldn\'t let it put you off the game. Even though the manufacture of the board is not up to the standard one expects from a top company, you will have worse in your collection and it isn\'t so bad as to detract from the play More ...

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