Flash Review — In the Year of the Dragon

Players: 2-5
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Age: 12+
Playtime: 75-100 min (but that’s very inflated, it never takes that long…)
Complexity: medium

Action selection in medieval China, with a nasty event everyone needs to deal with at the end of each turn.

Build palaces, staff them with doctors (against the plague) farmers (to feed your people during droughts), soldiers (gotta fight those invading Mongols)—hell, even courtesans to keep everyone entertained and score bonus points each turn.

In the Year of the Dragon might be the quintessential Stefan Feld design. You’re faced with interesting (i.e. agonizing) choices all through the game, you get to score points in multiple ways, and the system scales amazingly well from 2 to 5 players (one of Feld’s specialties). The priority track is genius: do you recruit staff that will perform better, or accept a slightly diminished performance in the hopes of going first on the next turn?
The game is also very straightforward; the most difficult concepts to explain are the end-of-turn events, and even those are not complex at all. This means your group is up and running in a matter of minutes, and the game is short enough—an hour on the outside—for someone to request another go at it when the final reckoning comes.

A 10th-anniversary edition was released a few years back, and it contains the Great Wall of China and Super Events expansions. Well worth getting—this is the kind of game that remains in a collection for a long, long time.

Most easily forgotten rule: When you pass to get money, you get BACK to 3 yuan. So if you had 2 already, you only get 1 more. (A lot of people just take 3 yuan, no matter what.)

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Flash Review — Hardback

Players: 2-5
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: fun
Age: 10+
Playtime: 45-60 min
Complexity: low

A deckbuilding game of words!
You start with a basic deck of letters, draw a hand of five cards, and proceed to spell words for points, special effects and/or money that’s used to purchase more letters and add them to your deck. The end goal is to score 60 points, but how you get there is up to each player.

The idea feels so obvious, it’s a wonder nobody did it before. And in fact, the design team did do it before: it was called Paperback and it didn’t turn out great. But the concept was fantastic, so I’m happy they decided to go back to that well and come up with a much-improved sequel.

There’s not much more to add. All the letter cards are shuffled together, and players buy them from a seven-card “offer row” with the money they generate spelling words. Letters come in several colors (themed as literary genres: romance, adventure, horror…) and work best together: in other words (ha!), you’d better stick to a couple of genres, so your cards trigger each other’s bonus effects more often.

Several optional rules (and related materials) are included in the little box, two of which I found essential: adverts, which enable players to convert money into points in the second half of the game (otherwise why not just buy point-scoring cards and cycle through your deck as often as you can); and events, which add some spice to the proceedings, by preventing players from using the letter E in their words, for instance, or by limiting the length of words to four letters.

The solo game is actually a coop mode for 1-5 players. The AI scores points in a variety of ways and acts as a timer: players need to collectively reach 60 points before the AI does (i.e. before the clock runs out).

Hardback is fun, quick and easy. I don’t even like word games that much, but this one’s a winner.

Most easily forgotten rule: If you spend an ink marker to draw an additional card, you must use that letter to spell your word, otherwise you forfeit your whole turn.



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Flash Review — Hallertau

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Okay
Age: 12+
Playtime: 50-140 min

A farming game (again!?) where the main focus is on gathering the necessary materials to upgrade a variety of small craft buildings in order to clear the way for your “community center,” which drives both the number of workers you get to use each turn and the number of basic victory points you score when the whole thing is over.

Yes, Uwe Rosenberg (of Agricola fame) is giving us another heavy farming game; but once again, it’s quite different from what came before and provides its own set of challenges and opportunities. There’s an array of available actions, but costs are incremental: the more people have used the action before you, the more expensive—in quantity of workers—your go at it will be.

You’ll end up drawing a bunch of cards from various decks and trying to tweak your timing so they combine in a cascade of bonuses and kickbacks. But keep an eye on your resources! Some of them you can grow, others you’ll have to trade for. Come the end of each turn, you’d better be sure you’ve stocked up on what you need to upgrade those craft buildings, so your operation can keep expanding.

Solo mode is a beat-your-own-score kind of deal, so your mileage may vary. But multiplayer? It’s one hell of a ride on the swing-plough.

Most easily forgotten rule: You can play a card AT ANY MOMENT, including right in the middle of an action—yours or an opponent’s. This goes counter to so many other games of its kind that I need to keep repeating that rule.




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