At the Gates of Loyang

The first time I saw At the Gates of Loyang was when I was still in Barcelona, it was sitting on a shelf in a games shop. The box’s crimson colour caught my eye and I recognized the art as similar to Agricola’s. Agricola is one of my favourite games that even my parents like to play too. So I imagined that Loyang, a game by the same designer – Uwe Rosenberg, might be similar in terms of enjoyment and complexity. It even uses one of the principles of Agricola – sowing and harvesting – “plant one, harvest multiple over time” element of the game which is a really smart concept that makes you think about your future progress.

So, I bought it about a month ago and played it several times since with various people (and even solo once) and I can tell that I’ve had enough time to make up my mind about it. First, even though that the game is practically just one part of Agricola expanded, it is not Agricola-lite by any means. Also, it’s not necessarily faster than Agricola, even if it lasts only for 9 rounds. And, I’m quite sure my parents don’t enjoy it as much as they do the game with sheep, boars and cows.

It’s not because it’s a bad game, it’s just that only a few people enjoys math, counting and planning and if you don’t plan well, you’ll hardly catch up with you opponents. This game punishes and it does so ruthlessly… As you’re planting pumpkins and tending to turnips.

The game puts you in a position of a farmer merchant in ancient China, you must plant and harvest vegetables and then sell them to your customers. You harvest once per round, there are 9 rounds in total, and each round is divided into three phases – Harvest phase, Card phase and Action phase. The basic rules are actually simple: You harvest one veggie from each of your fields and turn over a new field card in the Harvest phase; you gain two action cards to play with in the Card phase, and you perform various actions like buying, selling, sowing, using helpers or delivering to your customers in the Action phase.

One angry customer and three waiting to be served

There are 6 kinds of veggies to plant - wheat (which is technically not a vegetable), pumpkins, turnips, cabbage, beans and leek. You start with one field with 9 spaces called your Home field where you plant one of the first three crops so that you harvest at least one vegetable each turn but soon you will have to expand to satisfy the needs of your hungry customers. However, you can only sell harvested goods so planning ahead is a must.

Once again I turn to Agricola for comparison. I think I like the Loyang’s planning-progression system more. While in Agricola you can practically expand in three branches (livestock, crops or household), you tend to fight for scraps when a resource is taken from you by a preceding player and sometimes you are pushed to expand where you don’t want to. In Loyang, the choice of expansion is quite on you. You choose what customers to serve which leads you to what vegetable to buy and plant.

Talking about customers, there are two kinds – regular and casual. Both come to your market and won’t leave until their wants are fulfilled. The regular customers will pay you a gradually increasing price for 4 deliveries of two vegetables over several rounds. Failing to deliver in one round will make them unhappy, failing them while they are unhappy will result in having to pay a 2 coin fee. On the other hand, casual customers approach you with a list that contains 3 vegetables that need to be delivered to them once and at the same time. The price they pay, however, is considerably higher than with regular customers. Choosing which customers to serve, on in case of casual ones which store for later, is crucial as a single delivery of a more valuable vegetable like beans or leek to a casual customer might allow you to focus on better paying regular customers.

Messy multiplayer

You see, some of the vegetables are more profitable than others. A regular customer might pay for wheat and a pumpkin 4-5-5-6 while for a bean and a leek 7-8-9-10 and that’s 14 coins difference in total. However, both wheat and pumpkins can be planted on fields with 6 spaces (meaning that you will get 6 vegetables in total) and leek, for example, can be planted only on fields with 3 spaces.

Back to my parents (i.e. casual gamers) – my mom chose the strategy of planting as much of anything as she could and then hoping she’d get customers to serve, and my father tried serving casual customers only. My mom did alright, occasionally being forced to sell a vegetable to her shop for a coin or two when she had no customers to serve; my dad profited only in waves which affected his economy in a way that he was not able to grow continually. It came to me that it is important to balance the regular customers with the casual ones, and high demand (asking for leek or beans) ones with low demand ones or you won’t have enough money to either buy more vegetables or fields or action cards, or to advance on the victory track.

The victory track is called here The Path of Prosperity and shows clearly which player is winning. In the end, it doesn’t matter how many fields you had, how many customers you served, it all comes down to who has the most money = is the furthest on the track. The Path of Prosperity is made of 20 tiles, each with a number. Every round you can spend one coin to move up one tile on the path. Every other move up the path that turn will cost you the number on the next tile. So let’s say you’re standing on tile #4. You have 10 coins and you pay 1 coin to move to tile #5, then you can pay 6 coins to move to tile #6. You cannot move to tile #7 this turn because you don’t have 7 coins but next turn, you will be able to move to tile #7 for 1 coin again and so on.

It’s nice to immediately see who won at the end of the game and this thing with more and more expensive progress is an effective and easy idea and I wonder if it has been used in other games as well. And while the majority of rules is straightforward and easy to pick up, there is one thing that my co-players and I found difficult to understand and it is the Card phase. It's no use to explain it here, it's explained in the game's manual and you should be able to get it once you play the game. And even though I understand why it is in the game (player interaction, deciding of the first player and card exchange), I don't need to be a game designer myself to see that Uwe Rosenberg could do a better job at polishing this phase.

The other thing I need to criticise is the amount of down-time for non-active players in the Action phase. As a kind of action cards - helper cards - give you the option to “interact” with your opponents (using their stalls, delivering to their customers), players must play their turns in succession and that is boring for the players who must wait for their turn to come. I think that dropping the idea of the first player would both help with the confusing Card phase (where the card redistribution could be done differently) and players could take the Action phase simultaneously. The amount of interaction between players is minimal anyway.

Having acknowledged its shortcoming, I still feel that general reviews of Loyang were a bit too harsh. I understand that people were expecting the second coming of Agri-Havre and might have been disappointed by the lower complexity of Loyang but I don't think the game isn't bad at all. The vegimeepls (wooden blocks in shapes of respective crops) are cute, it's mostly easy to explain and it's fun if you like math.