About the first chinese banks

In Pingyao: First Chinese Banks you play as merchants in the Qing Dynasty, managing your bank 🏦 agencies and opening new ones, cunningly moving funds around, taking and giving loans, to be the most successful. The game feels quite unique - it needs a certain thinking to understand the economics of how to best make money. 💰 You might take a loan which feels bad, but use that money to catapult yourself forward. Pingyao also has a very nice arc to it. At first you barely have anything but as you use your hard earned money each round to open new agencies and run up your business, by the end you will be churning out coins. 🤑

I was a bit afraid how the game would go, as you only have 3 dice workers 🎲 and 6 places to go to - but every round had interesting decisions and compromises. So the flow of the gameplay was a pleasant surprise. 😁

The dice worker placement has its own nuances - lower values are more powerful and flexible, but higher values go first. Dice don’t block each other, but you can’t place the same value that is already there. Placing a lower value die makes you pay the difference in coins. So you have to watch out. 😵

The most interesting part of the game are the silver ingots. You can buy these at the beginning of a round. They are used to give out loans or to open new banks and they are a big part of your income, but they cannot be used to pay for things. There is quite an amount of juggling with these.

I am also curious what the expansion Golden Pawner will add to the game. Unfortunately it is the kind of expansion that replaces a lot of the things from the base game instead of expanding upon them, but that is intriguing as well. We will give it a try soon. 👍

I find it refreshing that the game board isn’t humongous - everything fits easily on the table. 😅 The player boards are quite small though. If you place the silver ingots on your bank agencies, they will cover the icons on it. That way it is easy to miss some things. 🕵‍♂️ Also I would have loved some kind of more thematic dice, these basic ones feel out of place to me. The metal coins and silver ingots are incredible though. 🔥