Game Review: At the Gates of Loyang

By W. Eric Martin
November 19, 2009

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Publisher: Hall Games

Players: 1-4
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Rules Language: English / German
Links:

Version played: Purchased copy
Times played: Five, once solo, twice with 2 and twice with 4

So I’m in round eight of At the Gates of Loyang, just after taking cards in the first pass through the card phase. The other three players are still in, dropping cards slowly one at a time, while I’m starting to write this review. My goal: See how far I can get before it’s my turn in the action phase.

One of the other players in this game, who played in an earlier four-player game today and a two-player game yesterday, has dubbed Loyang “the best game that I never want to play again.” His emotional arc while playing the game went from confusion to liking the game to really liking the game to becoming annoyed to outright dislike. Pal that he is, though, he offered to play a few more times to see whether the game speeds up with experience. Has it?

Unfortunately, no, it hasn’t. What players gain in experience and forethought, they lose from additional depth of what’s possible in the game and how they can best squeeze an extra coin out of the rearrangement of a dozen or more moves during the action phase. Oh, wait, my turn…

Inside the Gates, the Fields

So how does Uwe Rosenberg follow up the incredibly successful and well-received Agricola and Le Havre, both winners of multiple awards? With a title that precedes both of them. Yes, At the Gates of Loyang was designed in early 2005, after Rosenberg was inspired by the harvesting mechanism in the 2004 Splotter Spellen release Antiquity. In that game, once the raw materials from an area have been harvested or collected, the land can’t be used again. (Are they harvesting with bombs? I can’t imagine what else would destroy the land so thoroughly.)

In Loyang, players are planting vegetable crops, then harvesting them to sell to customers, both regular customers who want the same thing over and over again and passers-by who demand three specific items. By doing this you earn money, and money lets you advance on the Path to Prosperity – not a metaphysical path, mind you, but an actual path of spaces numbered 1-20 on your individual gameboard. The first space you advance each turn costs only $1, while each additional space costs the value printed on it. Whoever advances the farthest wins, with leftover cash breaking ties. (Side note: Cylindrical pieces are a terrible idea for scoring pieces, especially when you reach over your playing area again and again. Several players had to reconstruct their scores after knocking over their pawn, and we’re still not sure we chose the right spot.)

Each player has his own territory in which to work: his own set of fields of varying sizes, one of which is revealed each turn; his own customers and helpers that are acquired during the game, his own shop, from which he can buy or sell veggies; and his own market stalls at which to trade veggies, again acquired during play. None of this makes any sense thematically. Why am I the only one who can buy vegetables from this shop? Why are my fields trashed after the last plant is harvested? Why is this foreman or con man hanging out with me turn after turn until I need to use his services? No matter – don’t think about too much, and focus instead on the fundamental concept of harvesting crops to sell to customers. That’s easy to grasp, and everything else is just gamery details anyway.

Seconds, Minutes, Hours

Loyang lasts nine rounds, and at the start of each round you harvest one veggie from each field and turn over a new field. Players then have a card phase in which they’re dealt four cards – those cards being customers, helpers, market stalls and extra fields – then take turns either discarding a card from their hand into the courtyard or stepping out of the round by playing two cards: one from their hand and one from the courtyard. (The remainder of their cards in hand are then added to the courtyard.)

Players then each have an action phase in which they plant crops, buy or sell veggies to their shop, trade at their market stalls, use their helpers, deliver veggies to their customers or buy a “Two-pack” of cards. Each action except the last can be done multiple times, and all of the actions can be performed in any order. You have only two cards on your first turn, so you don’t have many actions open to you, but as the game progresses and you pile up more cards, the possibilities for what you can do and the order in which you can do them explodes – and here’s where I sour on the game.

While the game mechanisms in Loyang are nothing like Agricola and Le Havre – other than the bit of harvesting in Agricola – the feel of the games is similar. Each game begins slowly as players start with few resources on hand: nothing but cards and food in Agricola, a few coins in Le Havre, and a single nine-space field filled with crops and some cash in Loyang. You don’t have much that you can do, and the initial turns fly by with you feeling like a chump because you’re not making any progress. “I have only one customer, and I can’t even serve him this turn!”

As the games progress, however, players start voltronning up their resources and equipment and buildings, and by mid-game they’re standing in the snow puzzling until their puzzler is sore because so many possible plays are available to them. Loyang differs from the earlier Rosenberg designs, however, in that in Agricola and Le Havre players generally take only one action each turn: I place my token in this building; I choose this action; I take these resources. While the other players take their turns, I can contemplate which of four or five choices is best based on my current circumstances. By the time my turn arrives, I might have only 2-3 choices left based on what other players did – or someone does something unusual and I now need to rethink my options. Whatever the situation, though, once I take that action, the next player goes and the game keeps moving.

In Loyang, instead of having atomistic actions that build over time into mighty compounds, you do all the chemistry at once while the other players examine their fingernails and contemplate which toppings to order on their pizza. “If I serve this customer first, I’ll make $X, which will then let me buy this vegetable from the shop and trade at this stall in order to sell to this other customer. But if I trade first, then I can sell to this other customer. Or maybe I should buy a Two-pack first – but if I keep a casual customer, then I’ll earn less this turn for my sale, unless I get the helper that lets me pay to take someone’s else customer in which case I’ll earn more. But perhaps I should run through the trades at the market stall first in order to reduce the price of the Two-pack.” And so forth and so on. I’ll admit to being more sensitive to downtime and dithering than the average player, so perhaps this is my bias showing, but I’m not the only one who’s joked about taking out a book while another player takes his turn.

During another player’s turn, you can try to mentally run through the options to see how much money you can earn and what will leave you in the best situation for future turns but this planning doesn’t work in practice for two reasons:

1. You can buy a Two-pack during your turn, which gives you new options. The cost of a Two-pack is the greater of the number of helpers or the number of market stalls in your area, so you often want to mess with those areas during your turn in order to reduce the Two-pack price as every coin is precious – yet that Two-pack often lets you do better things than what you can do initially, perhaps by giving you a new casual customer or a helper that lets you trade for a leek at another market stall, so you may want to buy it sooner than later.

   The Merchant helper, for example, lets you buys veggies from your shop at a discount if you need to deliver the same veg to two regular customers, so buying a Two-pack might let you save a bunch of money in the current round, which would then require other adjustments, too. With all this in mind, you’re might then be figuring out how to use market stalls and helpers while not yet serving customers in order to maximize the potential payoff – unless certain cards are already in play or were discarded in the distribution round, in which case.... Eventually, though, you have to pull the trigger and do something. No, really, just do something – I’m tired of waiting.

2. A number of the helpers let one player mess with another one, either by delivering veggies to their customers, stealing a customer outright, swapping one market stall for another, or swiping a helper. If I’m playing after someone else, I’ll have a tough time planning all that I want to do as I won’t know which resources the other player will leave available to me. If they don’t deliver to that customer, then I’ll do this, forcing me to buy A to trade for B in order to serve regular customer C – but if they do deliver to that customer, then I’ll instead use helper D to buy vegetable E at a discount before buying Two-pack F giving me unknown cards G & H.

Despite all my kvetching, I think that At the Gates of Loyang is a very strong design that hits a lot of the elements that appeal to me as a gamer: Engine-building of a sort crossed with the mental depth of a tricky logic puzzle and the variety of a CCG, while also featuring subtle interaction between the players in the card distribution round, the turn order tricks (with four players), and the interactive helpers that crowbar in more Goldbergian elements to the logic puzzle that already lies before you.

I’m just not sure that I actually want to play the game that often – at least not as published. As I noted in my initial impression of Loyang, it would make a great title on the online gaming site SpielByWeb. SpielByWeb already features Reef Encounter, Tikal and Hacienda – three titles in which you can take multiple actions within each of your turns – and Loyang would be a perfect addition to its line-up as I could then take all the time I want to futz with this, that and the other option before settling on a course of action. (As with Tikal and Hacienda, the purchase of a Two-pack would create a time-reversal backstop beyond which you couldn’t cross since the knowledge of those cards would likely affect earlier choices.)

I hope an online version along these lines comes about because I am still interested in exploring the game further. While playing, I’ve been both fascinated and frustrated by situations in which I come up a coin short to advance the next step along the Path to Prosperity, holding ten coins when I need eleven, for example. As long as you have goods for delivery next round, you don’t need to sit on a ton of cash in this game – and ten is a ton – so I’d want to see whether I could avoid ledges like that and use my goods and customers more efficiently. After all, if I’m on step 9, I can pay 1 this round to reach step 10 and 13 the next round to reach step 12 – or I can pay 12 this round to reach step 11, then 1 the next round to hit 12. I’d save only one coin in the process, one lousy coin, yet every coin is vital in Loyang, just as every resource is vital in Agricola and Le Havre. Ideally that online version will come to pass as I’m unlikely to push Loyang onto the table again anytime soon.

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