{"id":8119,"date":"2019-12-16T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8119"},"modified":"2019-12-15T15:19:08","modified_gmt":"2019-12-15T20:19:08","slug":"yellow-yangtze-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/16\/yellow-yangtze-app\/","title":{"rendered":"Yellow & Yangtze app."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yellow & Yangtze is Reiner Knizia’s update to his\nall-time classic Tigris & Euphrates, which still sits in the top 100 on\nBoardgamegeek and pioneered the “highest\/lowest score” mechanic,\nwhere you score in multiple categories, and your lowest score is the one that’s\ncompared to your opponents’. Both are abstract games of area control that are\nwell-balanced so that it rewards strategy but also has mechanisms for preventing\nrunaway winners or leaving someone totally in the dust. Dire Wolf Digital just\nreleased an app version of Y&Y that I think is incredibly strong, including\nquality AI players (on the hard setting), great graphics, and intuitive game-play,\nand it’s kind of selling me on picking up the\noriginal game<\/a> at some point too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yellow & Yangtze makes several major tweaks to the rules\nof T&E, using hex tiles instead of squares, introducing a fifth color of\ntiles that you can use like a wild color, needing three tiles rather than four\nto build a pagoda, and giving each of the other four colors of tiles a unique\npower. You get six tiles at a time in your hand, plus a ‘leader’ in each color.\nOn a turn, you get two actions, most of which will involve placing two leaders\nor tiles on the board. You must place a leader next to a black tile. When you\nthen place a tile of the same color as a leader in the same cluster of tiles,\nyou get one point in that color. If you make a triangle of three hex tiles of\nthe same color, it becomes a pagoda, and then gives one point per round to the\nplayer whose leader of that color is in the same cluster. Each cluster can only\nhave one leader in each color, but it can have leaders from different players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conflicts between players are similar to the original. If\ntwo kingdoms (the game’s name for clusters) are connected, there’s a war, and\nit’s settled by players with leaders in each kingdom contributing red tiles\nfrom their hands. If you place your leader into a kingdom that already has a\nleader of that color, it’s settled by both players contributing black tiles.\nWhen you place a green tile, you get to choose your replacement from the display\nof six tiles; otherwise, you get new tiles after your entire turn, and they’re\nrandom. When you place a blue tile, which may only go on a river or shoreline\nspace, you can continue to place more blue tiles for free as long as they’re\nall adjacent. If you have blue tiles, you can also destroy any tile on the\nboard in a “peasants’ riot;” you blow up a black tile with this and\nthen any leaders adjacent to it are also removed if they aren’t still adjacent\nto another black tile. Yellow tiles are wild; you get points in the yellow\ncategory, but at game-end, those points are distributed to your other four\nscores to always raise your lowest score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The app is just great. It looks fantastic, with very bright,\nclear colors, so that there is no confusion between tiles or about what’s been\nplaced where. The screen shows you your tiles and as much or as little of the\nboard as you want, with smaller indicators for which opponents still have their\nleaders in hand (five dots under each opponent’s name, with unplaced ones lit\nup) and what six tiles are on display for players who place green tiles (a ring\non the lower right). Your scores are in the lower left \u2013 you can’t see\nopponents’ scores \u2013 and if you have an active pagoda that score has a flickering\nflame behind it, which makes it much easier to track. The easy AI is just tutorial\nlevel, the medium is just modestly challenging, but I have a hard time beating the\nhard AI when I play against two of them. The hard AI loves to use that\npeasants’ riot feature, which is probably good strategy but feels extremely\npersonal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The app is $9.99 right now, on the high end for board game\nadaptations, although with the cardboard game over $40 it’s good value for the\ngame play provided. Dire Wolf Digital does great work, with this their second\noutstanding app release of 2019 (along with Raiders\nof the North Sea<\/a>) and their Lanterns<\/a>\nanother favorite of mine for its animations; you can add Y&Y to the list,\nas I think it checks every box for an app, with challenging game play, great\ngraphics, and high ease of use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yellow & Yangtze is Reiner Knizia’s update to his all-time classic Tigris & Euphrates, which still sits in the top 100 on Boardgamegeek and pioneered the “highest\/lowest score” mechanic, where you score in multiple categories, and your lowest score is the one that’s compared to your opponents’. Both are abstract games of area control that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[579,60,161,580],"class_list":["post-8119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apps","tag-boardgames","tag-highly-recommended","tag-reiner-knizia","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8119"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8122,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8119\/revisions\/8122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}