In the Year of the Dragon

In the Year of the Dragon is brutal board game. You are a prince of a province in ancient China, leading your people through catastrophic times. You juggle advisors, hiring and firing to suit your plans to survive the onslaught of calamities. The prince with the province that suffers the least, is the winner.

The game revolves around twelve events tiles, ten are shuffled randomly while the first two events are peaceful times. The shuffled event tiles are pairs of: taxation, famine, Mongol invasion, and plague. There is also a pair of festivals tiles in the shuffle that offer a breathing room between catastrophes. As a wise leader, you hire advisors like accountants, scholars, generals, physicians, farmers, pyrotechnists​ (​for fireworks)​, monks, and courtesans to mitigate catastrophic damages. Therefore the key to the game is human resource management, strategically hiring and firing of various advisors. You wish that you can keep all your advisors but each advisor needs rice during the famines, medicine during the plagues, and living quarters in your palace. Thus every advisor must be fired to make room for the next essential advisor.

The difficulty in acquiring the right resource at the right time comes from the contested turn order. An inner track on the board is used to track prestige points; the player with the highest prestige has priority in picking one of the seven Action cards. For instance, picking the harvest Action card generates one rice token, and if you have a senior farmer, you generate two additional rice tokens. If you want to pick from the group of actions chosen by a previous player, you must pay money to take that action. Thus you cannot always get what you want when you want it, unless you are ahead in prestige or have a large cash reserve. However, spending too much resources in prestige will distract you from managing your advisors and their productive efforts in mitigating catastrophes.

Every choice you make is agonizing because you want to do several things but you cannot. You want to expand your palace for more advisors, advance your prestige to improve your place in the turn order, harvest rice for an upcoming famine, and earn some money to open up future options -- and yet you can only do one thing at a time. Making tough choices, being flexible in your plans is what makes In the Year of the Dragon​ an elegant and refreshingly unique game.

There is a fan-made Flash version of the boardgame. Since there is no tutorial in the Flash version, you may want to use this play aid that outlines the steps of game play, or you can glance at the ​rulebook as well.