Yellow And Yangtze Play Session – The Amazing Civilization Building Game

Intro To Yellow And Yangtze

Description

Yellow And Yangtze, the period of the Warring States (475-221 BCE) describes a time of endless wars between seven rival states: Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Wei, and Zhao. These states were finally unified in 221 BCE under the Qin dynasty to lay the origin of today’s China, with its two main rivers: the Yellow and the Yangtze.

Yellow & Yangtze, the sister game to the highly acclaimed board game Tigris & Euphrates, invites you to replay this eventful period and to lead your dynasty to victory.

In Yellow & Yangtze, players build civilizations through tile placement. Players are given five different leaders: Governor, Soldier, Farmer, Trader, and Artisan. The leaders are used to collect victory points in these same categories. However, your score at the end of the game is the number of points in your weakest category.

Conflicts arise when civilizations connect on the board. To succeed, players’ civilizations must survive these conflicts, calm peasant revolts, and grow secure enough to build prestigious pagodas.

Details

Yellow And Yangtze

Finding out about the game

I must confess that I didn’t even know that this game existed until late 2020. I had a session of Tigris & Euphrates coming up and was busy brushing up on the rules on YouTube. One of the suggested videos was on Yellow And Yangtze by Mr. Tom Vasel himself. The video was intriguing although there did not seem to be many differences in the gameplay at the time. Also, I seemed to be in the minority of people that did not like the artwork.

Gaining Access to Yellow and Yangtze

I was chatting to one of my friends I had over during the session of Tigris & Euphrates and mentioned Yellow And Yangtze to him. I asked if I should maybe purchase it? Turned out he already had it on order and was just waiting for it to arrive. No point in me buying it as well. We wrapped up our session of T&E. I narrowly lost by one point. We decided that we need to get Yellow and Yangtze to the table as soon as possible after it arrived. The day was coming…

Gameday

Getting going…

We had the gameday set and it ended up being a month and a half later. I managed to get my girlfriend and her sister to join the game. It was bound to be interesting as it was her sisters’ first time playing one of Reiner Knizia’s games. I think the whole not being a color but a symbol, and the lowest-scoring category being your final score can often throw off newcomers to his games. This didn’t seem to be the case though as we were playing within ten minutes of everyone arriving. Shoutout to TheGameBoyGeek’s rules/review video. Everyone watched the rules video in their own capacity before gameday.

Play starts…

I place my opening red and black leaders near one of the three space rivers. Why did I do that I was asked? I told them I like to start a state with those leaders as they are the more difficult ones to try and oust later on (in my head it makes sense, but might not be a real strategy). I also liked the placement owing to it being near to the three river blocks. Well, that was my thinking at least.

Play proceeds with some players using that same move. But soon after that everyone goes their own way. I place two red tiles going for a third turn pagoda but my obvious plan gets blocked by my girlfriend. She gets a third turn pagoda herself and I am furious/jealous. I start an internal conflict and oust her red leader getting the pagoda for myself. Elsewhere in the kingdom peace is had, with the player to my right having 2 or 3 pagoda’s up in no time flat – something must be done!

Middle of the game…

Battles happen, pagodas move and you soon realize that this game has more conflict than T&E. I can only get monuments (that earn points at the end of every turn) in T&E back by internal or external conflicts. In Yellow And Yangtze you can get it just by placing three tiles of the same color and choosing to steal someone’s pagoda. It is a nice rule tweak that I like. This happens a lot throughout this section of the game. The lead player was targeted quite hard at this point, which opened the game up for me.

The end is near…

I tried to fly under the radar by not talking or pointing out too much at this point. People continued to move pagodas that were mostly not my own. This is quite a lifesaver as they generate points at the end of every turn if you have a leader of that color in the state. The almighty yellow pagoda was mine for three turns until it was taken. This helped me gain some much-needed points in green. Yellow points are wild points and can be used for any color. The game is super close at this point and there is lots of tension in the air, it is palpable.

End of the game…

The end of the game comes down to one turn. A war is initiated and it can go either way. As it stands the war will be decided by my girlfriends’ sister. Will she abstain from sending in red tiles, or help our cause? She throws in four red tiles and victory is not had by the instigator and probable winner had this last battle gone his way. Three more turns go by which are mostly a few points here and there but nothing to swing victory one way or another.

Final scores are tallied up, and they sit at 10,9,9,8. Such a close game, but I took it home with the ten points in the end. Fun was had by all. We would 100% play this one again.

Final Thoughts

Is one game better than the other? No. Torn from the same cloth they are, but the slight variation in rules makes them so different. This is a must purchase if you enjoyed playing T&E.

Differences

• leader powers
• 3 hexagon tile placements of the same color create a pagoda (Y&Y) vs 4 square tile placements of the same color creating a monument (T&E)
• internal conflicts are with black tiles only
• external conflicts are with red tiles only and all leader battles are determined by that, irrespective of color
• tile placement or discarding thereof have special abilities that trigger
• pagodas are not permanent in their placement and can be moved unlike monuments
• there are no treasure tiles on the board; instead, the yellow cubes earned from tiles placement, etc. act as wildcard points and can be assigned to any color

FAQ

How do you play Yellow and Yangtze?

I really enjoyed TheGameBoyGeek’s rules/review video on how to play the game. Alternatively, the rules can be found here.

Yellow and Yangtze rules

The rules can be found here.

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