Rusty Gates

I’m a big fan of Uwe Rosenburg’s board game Agricola. (I’m a bit on the fence as to whether the expansion is really a good addition or not, but the core game itself is great.) This year, I’ve been able to try a couple of his other games. I’m sorry to say that one of them, At the Gates of Loyang, was a bit of a disappointment.

The game isn’t a total loss, actually, but there are a number of unfortunate things about it to match the strong plusses. It’s another agriculture-themed game, where players plant and harvest their own vegetables to then turn around and supply to customers for money. Money is used primarily to buy victory points, in a system that is interesting, but makes catching up from behind rather difficult. The score track runs from 1 to 20. Each turn, the first point you buy costs you just 1 dollar. Each additional point you then choose to buy costs the point value you’re moving to on the track. For example: if you start the turn on 6, moving to 7 costs just 1 dollar, but then moving on to 8 costs 8 dollars (for a total of 9), and then on to 9 in the same turn costs 9 more (for a total of 17). If you don’t at a minimum buy your “one cheap point” a turn, you’re unlikely to be in the running to win, which feels like a pretty harsh way to get put out of the game early.

Before each player does his planting, harvesting, and selling, there’s an interesting mechanic for obtaining cards. Each player is dealt a small hand of four, and a few more are turned face up on the center of the table. Things then proceed around the table from player to player. On your turn, you MUST discard face up to the table one of your four cards to “pass” and stay in this phase of the game. Otherwise, you must select exactly one card from the growing choices on the table, and exactly one card from your hand (discarding the rest), playing those two cards for your turn.

There are several great tensions in this mechanic. The longer you can discard cards that are useless to you, the longer you can hang around in the hopes that someone else will discard something useful to you. But the real rub is that you’ll often have more than one card in your hand you’d like to use! And the only way to do that is to discard one, hope no one else snatches it up, and then wait for your turn to come around again so you can take your former discard along with the other card you kept. This can lead to interesting bluffs, where you try to entice other players to leave the auction early.

But in another unfortunate negative about the game, this is basically the whole extent of player interaction. Once this interesting phase of the game is over, players harvest their vegetables, supply their customers, and play their cool actions, in a sequence so long that it sometimes feels like one player is performing for the others. Apparently even the game’s creator recognized this could be a slow and boring part of the game, because the rules tell you that when four players are participating, two of them should just take their turns simultaneously. Each “turn-taker” uses one of the other two players to “police” them and make sure their actions are all legal, then those roles reverse. It’s a bit confusing and unusual, but really needs to exist just to get this game down under 90 minutes. I once played without this rule, and the game took upwards of two-and-a-half hours. Yikes.

I suppose my summary is this: I would play this game every once in a while (with the right people, who could keep it moving). But my real hope is that the interesting “card drafting” mechanic resurfaces in another, better game some day.