Buying, selling, planting, harvesting and trading vegetables!

"At the Gates of Loyang" went from being a game I had never heard of to bought and on the table in the span of about eight days. This almost never happens.

My wife and I went to the local game store just over a week ago and saw this large Agricola-like box, and took a look. I'm rarely attracted to a game due to the box, but as it was another game in Uwe Rosenberg's "harvest trilogy" we thought it was worth looking into more. Well, my wife did. I wasn't terribly interested. She took a look on BGG about it, read a couple of reviews, and pointed some of them out to me. It looked to be a pretty good two player game, so it went on the wish list... and then I got an email from the local store with a coupon for 25% off one item. With the price of Loyang what it is, we decided that would be the game to get.

So, I punched out the few punchable bits, sorted things out into bags, and tonight we sat down to give it a try. I had taken a look at both the rule booklet in the box and the "narrative" rule booklet from the files section here, and thought I had a pretty good basic idea of how the game worked. To be honest, I did. But there are enough little fiddly rules to keep track of, and the two rule booklets describe each thing in different ways. So as we began to play, I was almost instantly frustrated by how vague these things could be. In particular, the special rules for two players during the "distribution round" and the wording of the rules for the harvest phase required referencing both documents at once. I'm not normally so confounded.

Anyway, we basically got things figured out (although there were some snafus with scoring and field acquisition). The basic flow of the game is pretty quick: First you harvest and gain a new field, then you distribute cards, then you take turns taking your actions and gaining your points. I've seen some people complain about the "multi-player" solitaire aspects of the action phase, but that's part of the fun. Each round, you get to draft cards from the deck, looking for a combination of customers, trading stalls, and helpers that will score you coins. So it becomes a puzzle of sorts to see how you can maximize those pieces, with some control in the form of the "Two-pack" (extra cards) and the ability to randomly add additional cards into the Courtyard to draft from (pushing your luck, in a way).

My wife started off strong, having a couple of turns where her fields spawned exactly the right vegetables to work with her traders to provide both regular and casual customers with their orders. It sucked for me. In one early hand, I drew nothing but regular customers, meaning I had to take one... but I had nothing to provide them with because it was too early in the game. This may have been a blessing in disguise, though, because I was able to then focus my resources on the customer I went with and build up my economy.

The game was quite close, as I expected it would be from reading reviews. The way points are scored means that it's easy to get the first one in each round, but increasingly difficult to get additional points. I lucked into getting the plowman a couple of times which helped to reload some fields, which ended up allowing me to have just the resources I needed to be unbeatable in the final round. This was visibly upsetting to my wife, who basically had to give up. She just didn't have enough vegetables coming from her fields, even with trading stalls, and she had taken an early loan to get her engine started, and it came back to bite her in the end.

Overall, it was a fun game (although, obviously the most fun was in the middle once we had learned the rules, but not gotten to the "foregone conclusion" part of the last two rounds). It's not as cutesy as Agricola, but it's not as ponderous as Le Havre. So I'm glad we made the purchase. And we'll definitely be trying it again... I forgot that private fields that empty are removed from the game, and only remembered as I was writing this report. Oops. That would definitely have made a difference in the game-play. We'll get it right next time!