Nueva adquisición: In the Year of the Dragon
En el Año del Dragón es mi última adquisición, decidida tras leer varios análisis favorables.
De 3-5 jugadores, donde tratan de sobreponerse a eventos futuros, casi todos negativos. El que logra rescatar mas puntos de victoria de esos desastres, gana.
Mis Geekbuddies le dan lo siguiente:
Analysis for In the Year of the Dragon Average Rating: 7.15
| User | Rating | Own/Want/Trade | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8.5 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | Played 4 times, very interesting, I want to play it more. I love the turn order mechanic. | |
| 8 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | No comments | |
| 8 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: Yes | This is a really solid game, and my only misgiving is whether there are certain dominant moves or strategies that render the spectrum of viable approaches an illusion. Despite some niggling suspicions I look forward to playing this more to disprove them, and if indeed there is no "optimal" strategy, then I can see this in my top 10. Why? Well it is very stress-inducing which is right up my alley, plus I really like the interplay of the initiative track with the abilities of the characters. This is a refreshingly different take on some of the principles behind Notre Dame (unsurprisingly, as they share the same designer) | |
| 8 | Own: No Want: Yes Trade: No Wishlist: Yes | A big balancing act where you need to pick your poisons and hope they don't end up hurting you too much. The game feels restrictive, and that certainly drives a lot of the angst. Time will tell if it ends up hurting the game in the long run. I have a suspicion five players will be too many. I don't anticipate this going up from 8. | |
| 8 | Own: Yes Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | No comments | |
| 7 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | It
is a solid action drafting game (players chose one at a time from the
available actions). The problem is that I'm on the verge of saturation
when it comes to action drafting. After El Grande came out, everyone
was trying to use its Area Control system. Now that Area Control is
played out everyone has looked back to El Grande for more things to
take, with Caylus it was action drafting. Because Caylus was so
successful, it seems that everyone is using it now. Agricola is heavily
steeped in it, but it also is running on the other hot design mechanic
the Engine System. With In the Year of the Dragon, it is all drafting
and action drafting. It works well, and because the game beats you up
so much it is engaging, but come on, can we give action drafting a rest. About the game itself, well, it is annoying that at a certain point in the game (halfway?) some players will be well aware that there will be no way for them to win. I don't mind it in some games, but here this game is all about point accumulation. It is so abstract that I can't just focus on some element of your game for fun and just hope to place as best as I can. Certainly experience will yield the best success, but that makes me wonder how balanced it is... I don't know, its fine. What isn't fine is the graphic design of the board. I'm not sure why there even is a board. I guess it is supposed to be a carpet? If just looks like someone printed out orange on a sheet of paper only to discover it isn't water resistant ink when they spilled their Mountain Dew on it. It looks like it was produced straight from the prototype. Ugly and uninspired. I wish they would have put a beautiful Chinese landscape on it. Maybe, have the scoreboard be the Great Wall? Perhaps the whole thing as a top view of the Forbidden City? Blech. |
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| 7 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | Im
Jahr des Drachen is the newest alea game, so of course it had to be on
my play list. Stefan Feld is apparently alea's in-house designer as of
late, and I enjoy both of his previous games, Und Ru(h)m und Ehre and
Notre Dame. I think Im Jahr is the best of his alea series to date
though. Im Jahr is a game of adversity. At the most baseline level, you're trying to build buildings, get people to put in them, and keep everyone alive. This is made difficult in various ways by the Cossacks (Mongols actually, but the swords look Cossack-like), the plague, droughts (with damage prevented by coarse-ground cocaine tacos), and the incredibly deadly king/emperor/ruler type of your choice (who will kill many more people than the Cossacks if you fail to grovel adequately). Each round is based on two major halves. The first half, each player can select an action from a menu of X where X is equal to the number of players. Multiple people can select the same action, but they have to pony 3 bucks if someone else is already there. The actions each give you things like victory points, or chips that generate victory points, or chips which help you to avoid unpleasant events. The second part of the game involves drafting personality tiles off the board. These tiles allow the actions you take in the first half of each round to be more efficient. They also give you points on the sub-track, which determines player order, and which tends to be very important if you aren't rolling in the cash. After that, an event occurs, most of which are negative, and most of which involve losing people if you can't fend it off. The events are all laid out at the start of the game, so you can see what is coming, and everyone is likely to be dinged by something at some point in time. The end game scoring is the usual alea mish-mash with a tonne of things generating VPs, i.e.: the buildings you have put up, the number of people you have, points you've accrued throughout the game for having buildings, points you've accrued throughout the game for having bonus point scrolls, &c. I think this game fits together well, and I enjoy the tough choices and the ability to look ahead at the events and craft a game length strategy. In some senses, people have been comparing it to Notre Dame in that it is a game where it is nice to have strong infrastructures in place so that one can take actions with increased efficiency and get a bigger return, but it's impossible to do everything well, and the order the events come out in seems like it will dictate some strategic choices. My only real reservation about this game is my feeling that with a cash heavy infrastructure (i.e.: a couple of the coin-makers) you can almost ignore what the other players are doing. The only real interaction in the game is based on the battle for scarce actions, which is the major angst in the first half of the round, and also partially dictates person tile choice in the second. Cash allows you to effectively buy the action you want for 3, and to take the person tiles you want without paying much attention to the turn order sub-track. Not every game will make cash a sound choice, so this is a niggle, but so it goes. I like the game though, and I would like to play it some more to form a more solid opinion on it. This might have a hard ceiling on it where players can craft certain strategies for certain event sequences (i.e.: when this event occurs early do this...&c.) but that's complete speculation on my part. At this point, I enjoy, would be willing to play it anytime, but don't need to own it. 7 for starters. |
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| 6 | Own: Yes Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | Hm. It works, but I'm missing the fun. 1 Play with 3, 2 solitaire. 3 plays. 10-2007 - 23 - Spiel Essen |
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| 6 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | It might be me but playing this with 5 players is a really tough game of "pain management". Interestingly, it doesn't scale (from number of tiles) with different number of players. | |
| 5 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | While there wasn't anything wrong with the game, it was dull. I didn't feel like I had any new experiences with the game, as we've seen most of this before. It was mainly a game of damage control - how to block or deal with pain, and I really don't enjoy that type of pounding-on-your-head game. | |
| 0 | Own: No Want: No Trade: No Wishlist: No | It isn't better than Notre Dame. In fact I think I don't like this game at all but I have to play it again just to make sure. I felt that the game was playing me and not the opposite. Everything seems to be about damage control. |
