Intro to Zhanguo

🎎 Zhanguo: The First Empire is incredible. 😁 And incredibly complex! This is the quickest way to summarize this game.
Never having played the original Zhanguo, the experience was totally new and unique to us. It does a lot of things differently than most of our euros, and this is the good kind of complicated - the rules aren’t convoluted like in some other games, it’s just that there is quite an abstract/indirect way you can do things, and every little decision you make has a ton of layers, and you often see the consequences to choices many turns later.

Learning the rules isn’t too hard, but you need some time to digest everything. However the general flow of the game is simple: 👉As the round begins, everyone draws 6 cards, and you will be playing 1 card each in turn order until no one has any cards left; finally you check for end of round rewards and repeat this until the 5th round is over.

🃏 The cards are really spicy though! They can be played in 2 ways. ☝️ You either tuck them under your player board, which enhances the action type depicted on it, or you could play it on the Court board to do 1 of 6 main actions. Cards have numbers on them, which is important if you want to trigger your bonus actions from tucked cards - depending on the action, your card has to have a higher or lower value than the previous one played.
So the color, number, and action types on your cards are all important, from the first minute of the game till the last. And you only get 6 in a round! 🙀

💭 The game board has lots of information and spots with bonuses to place your beautiful screen printed meeples on. You will mostly be interacting with your own player board though, which depicts the 5 regions that are also on the game board. This is your main puzzle. You will be placing 3 kinds of Officials and moving them around, placing down worker tokens that you use to build things. You really have to plan in advance if you want something done. You also have to deal with Unrest in your regions that can restrict you, and collect unification tokens for the end of round rewards is essential too.
So many things to look out for! 🤯🤩