Jiangnan: Life of Gentry - One Round Playthrough Board Game

hi it's tyron and stella from meeple university today we'll be playing jiangnan life of gentry for one or more rounds and teaching you as we play coming up [Music] let's play jiangnan life of gentry game design by do goo way and published by mo ideas game design we are using a prototype copy of the game and so the rules and components may not be final and if you find value from this video later please hit that like button subscribe to us and hit the bell and leave your feedback in the comments for others to find for now let's get to the table hi everyone and here we are for our one round playthrough for jiangnan life of gentry we'll take you down onto the board here there's plenty to see and we'll take you through it in steps and we'll sort of show you as we go along what's what's critical to the key parts of the game we are gentry in this um in this time period here and over six rounds we're going to try to score as many points as we can by doing gentry like things we aren't this basically yes so a lot of it is we're going to be publishing portfolios and we can get a lot of points out of those we can go traveling for inspiration we can get assistance to help us to take more actions and give us some bonuses and throughout the game we also have to manage our stress track and so there's a number of different things going going on so this is actually essentially is a worker placement action where you have three meeples per realm and you also do an action selection sort of like a back building with these styles that you draw um each round each yeah each round yeah so these are our starting tiles um we have 12 of them in a bag four of them start on and you'll see us draw some more of these out and those will tell us what actions we can go and take some of the other things you can sort of you can see out here we've got the boat track down the bottom a lot of the scoring is going to come from here but we'll come back to exactly how that works a little bit later we've got some new action tiles we'll be drafting from here this one is the round tracker and scoreboard again we'll see how that works a little later but other than that it's all about yeah gaining these portfolios fulfilling them at these places here and getting some bonuses with actions traveling and shops so i think we should go straight into it start to show you the sorts of actions here and we yeah we'll explain as we go yes so this is the turn order track stella is first internal so the first thing to start the game off i've already drawn these four tiles and what i do then i choose one of these one from these four for my action so i will pick this one and then the right most tile will get discarded from the game and you get the bonus showns underneath so the actions at the top and the bonus underneath so i will discard i have to discard this one because this is the rightmost one from the game that was this one the smiley face means that i lose uh you lose i lose one stress which is good um so this is the action which is at the top so i can choose any of these i can even choose on the right batman but that means if i choose the right one this one that gets discarded so i choose that one and here i go put my meeple on to here so this is the action that is the same symbol and i will put my meepo on the right hand side and do the action so the action is to pay one coin to again lose one more one stress and i will put one servant onto one of these four assistants which i can then recruit to my area to my studios and gain the actual um actual benefit and end of round benefit yes but only after placing that's correct so i'll do that one so and this second action i don't do because it just means that if i have two then like recruit to my studio yep and now you gain the immediate benefit for that particular assistant great so these are the ideas that's what you need basically to complete contracts uh which means i get one of these to my supply okay and that is your action and then you refill your action track yes so this goes to the right yes and i draw from the back here and there you go and this actually get put aside and that would be used again uh it will put back again to the back later yes you can put that into one of the notches above your board that's right yeah all right now for my first action um i we started with these starter portfolios so we did each gain one this one which is yellow might be a little hard to see it requires one yellow idea to fulfill so i can already fulfill this and i'm going to do that as my first action so i can fulfill in two places either the tea house or the tavern and i'm going to fulfill in the tea house so i'm going to spend this tea house token here and then i discard this one which gives me a coin so that's out of the game i get a coin now i'll place my meeple here at the tea house now my actions first i if i had any servants in the tea house already i would get coins but i do not so we'll skip over that one now i can fulfill my portfolio so i'll pay my one yellow idea i'll place my portfolio down here to be completed my immediate bonus for a yellow portfolio is some money so i get another coin i'm up to five money very rich term a a life of rich gentry yes he did and then at the end of the round i've got another potential action that i can take here now what i do is i shuffle these along so i'm going to get rid of this blue one on the end of the track and replace it with a yellow one because that's what i fulfilled at the start and i put one of my servants on the portfolio fulfilled very good so that will now benefit me if i come back here again yay okay now i finished my action i slide these down and draw two new ones from my bag and place them onto these slots here so that is my first action complete and on to me now that's my second action i want to go to this area so i will use this unfortunately i for as a bonus i have to choose this one because this is the most right hand side one and i can't lose any more so i just basically lose that bonus this cup um this one got discarded yep but of course if you if you hadn't then you would have lost the only tile that was on your board that would have let you take this action it's all a matter of which is more important to you at the time and the other thing is that this one these are the two that i've discarded so far so that's another layer to this strategy that means these two are gone from the game but there's an opportunity to draw more or you know there's a similar action so i'm not really that that sad about it hopefully famous last word right so um here i go go to this area so this is the kind of like a rondelle bonus area here um my servant is right here and the question mark here you can see is right there now i can move my servant here clockwise or anticlockwise one for free so i can go here or here gaining the bonus that is being passed by the seven now oh i can pay one point which is what i'm gonna do i pay one coin to move two instead of one and i will move anticlockwise so one two i'm getting a victory point over there and i will gain a red idea now i will gain this benefit so this benefit is basically i want to put this to one of the assistants which i'm gonna put it right here and without gaining the bonus so it says you know idea cross and because i have two or more assistance of my servants there i will take this to my portfolio now normally i would put it on the right hand side but we kind of like have to a little bit tight in space so you can see everything better so i'm going to put it there my 7 go back to my seventh pile now this one here why do i take this one and why do i go here there's another reason this is what i say taran laser strategy so this boat symbol indicates end of round uh it means that you pay one coin to do the action that is that question mark is at right now well let's pay it's pay one coin to pay a coin to complete a contract you need a little bit of extra money to take use of that at the end of the round but it gives you a good way of completing portfolios without having to go to these spaces which you've already discarded a couple of the action tokens absolutely and there's another reason why i want to go here now i've already started on collecting assistance in this game so collecting assistance not only is good but it's also one of the game objectives that you can pick and that would get scored so i can see this means that whoever's got the most oh one assistant world score point per assistant so if i have got the majority in here which we'll show later and i can pick this one and not this one to be one of the scoring objectives so you'll see later yes all right and then we refill with another one of the assistants like so all right so now my second action i i'm out of portfolio so i want to go over to the society and get some more portfolios so i'm going to play my society token i discard this travel one and gain a yellow idea and now i'll go through put the meeple there and go through the society actions so firstly this is the turn order changing space so i get to go here i'll be first into an order next time around now i have the option to switch to pay to sweep these out to get a different choice of portfolios and then i can take two portfolios or two ideas of my choice or one of each and there's a lot of red portfolios here and just looking out across what might score there's not that many that show the red portfolio there's a lot more in yellow and blue so i'm actually going to sweep that out i've got all this money i might as well sweep them out so we'll discard those these go on the bottom of the deck and then we'll deal out four more red blue blue and red okay that's that's not ideal i was really hoping for some more yellow but you know what that's all right i'll still go and get at least one of these reds because reds do give you a money income which is helpful and i'll grab one of these blues well done add them into my collection and replenish and um there we go so these are now in my hand i'll pop them here and i need to complete those to get them out of my hand all right i'll slide these across and now i'll add two more drawn from my bag all right my go now i kind of like want to go to one of these but then i don't i really don't want to get wasted bonus again because i don't need to reduce my stress i'm going to go here so this is my action i don't know that's a really good idea we'll see the the boots gets me there now this is where i travel i send my servants to go travel to see the world uh oh let me just discard that that's the bonus so that's one money which is good i need money so out of this this is center you can choose this and this or this or this i will choose this one so the next one i can choose this one if i want to so by going there i pay one money and i get one blue idea and this bonus so this bonus is actually a a contract new portfolio from the ones available yes so i can only get one portfolio yes so i'll probably i'll try this one let's see what happened okay okay so that goes into your hand yep face down we replenish that another red one we've got a lot of the red ones coming out here yeah okay let's slide them across and that's your turn all right so i i also want to start traveling and again a couple of reasons there um i can get some nice bonuses out of traveling i also need to i need to start getting some scholars down on these later actions otherwise i'm not going to get any choice over these bonus tiles early in the game which could which could harm me so i'm going to do this one i discard this one from the game which lets me reduce a stress and now i'll place my scholar over here so i go to the left of stella's piece and over there my options are well i'm going to go to the same place that stella went to i'm going to go there that's going to cost me one money get a blue one reduce one stress again some down to zero stress that's right yeah and i shall take a blue idea and a contract so i'll take this yellow one so i've actually got three contracts in hand which is not i'll show you in a minute that's not a deal we've got all the red ones coming out there now wow um and the reason i didn't want to go to any of the others is that their bonus again is that question mark action over there which is a free completion not free completion pay a coin to get an extra action to complete a contract a portfolio and i just didn't have the ideas yeah and this moves forward to the next round yes at the next round yeah it should be more valuable next round so yeah that covers that i'll slide those down i shall add these ones out of my bag and that's it that's it that takes us to the end of round one so first we do upkeep so upkeep is getting bonuses it's all the ones listed here it's bonuses for our published portfolios bonus actions for our assistance and then we gain stress so your first intern order yep so i don't have any completed portfolio they're all still here so i don't get anything so there's those three well one two three different portfolios and unfortunately um this cost me one to do this question like action but that's that one itself costs another one so unfortunately at this time i can't have i can't do it because i don't have enough money on my side so i can spend one yellow idea to gain one victory point so that's one of the bonuses of these yellow portfolios is if you keep enough yellow ideas going you can turn them into a number of points at the end of each round and the red one tends to do red ones give you money and the blue one does not give you anything but kind of like higher amount but not ongoing benefits correct okay i have no assistance and then we both gain stress equal to our assistance plus our unfinished portfolios so i have three unfinished portfolios i go up to three stress i have two plus one assistance so that's also three yes and if you end up at six you lose one of your actions in the next round which is not good don't want to do that probably don't want to be sometimes it might pay off probably it is the penalty there so that's that's the income next we adjust the turn order so i have jumped in ahead of you this round by going over here so we'll swap those over for the next round next we choose new action tiles so these are the six tiles available we've each discarded three from the game we're going to gain another three and they're just going to sit up here they don't go back in our bag till round three we draft them in left to right order based on our scholars so i get the first pick i can see i'm i'm focusing on the tea house so i want to grab a uh another tea house action you also get the second picture i get the second one and let's just go all in on the tea house i can make a lot of bonus out of that and then my turn i'm gonna pick the assistant one because you know that's my strategy yeah hopefully all right i'm going to get uh this travel one because i can see some benefit in travel coming and that leaves you with these last two yep which is the um this action yes all right now it's boat time so we each row row row your boat gently down the stream so we each place an assistant underneath our scholars yep it won't always be underneath the scholar now that this is my spot on this boat all of my servants on this boat will go there and this is a this is a majority competition now the boats are going to sail and this boat is going to sail off the board stella has the majority one to zero and so you get to pick which of those two tiles will be scored of course i talked about this earlier so yes you're gonna so everyone is gonna score two points per assistant at the end of round two three points at the end of round four and four points at the end of round six so this assistant is worth nine points to stella correct through this process this mountain one is removed from the game this servant returns to you and this boat is gone now the rest of the boats sail down the board so you can see that where it might be an area majority effect it's a moving one so this is not just going to be for whoever does the most tea house actions it's going to get a chance at every single spot all right then we draw one new private boat to replace it and you won't see this one score in this video but this is going to work differently the end of the game whoever has the majority on this one that person and that person alone will score this bonus up here in the top left corner which is uh four points for every space you've got left on your stress track after the final round okay so now we retrieve our scholars ahead of the next round and we do a little bit of a reset so we're going to add the level two tiles onto here oops we pick six of them at random for the two player game of course there'll be more at higher play accounts the question mark token is going to rotate one step clockwise so now if you take that question mark action it is going to let you put one servant somewhere onto a boat so this could be a big way of influencing who gets to place these tiles of the choice in this next round we are set up for the second round so let's do it so you are first player this time i am now what i really need is resources ideas because i've got three portfolios in my hand i need nine total ideas to fulfill them so i need to take the actions that are going to give me a lot of these looking down the board at what i've got here my best way right now is to take the assistant action even if i don't really want to get an assistant i can still get some good ideas out of that so i'm going to play this one i'm going to discard the temple fare action and get a yellow idea things will slide down i'll place my scholar here so that's going to help me get the majority on this one and dictate what's going to happen here plus you can you get points as well for your assistant if i can fulfill one yes that's correct i have to pay a coin to reduce one of my stress and then i'll place a servant out and i'm focusing it on my yellows and blues i'm going to go to this new one here and grab a yellow and blue that's very good based on the immediate bonus down there so if we look here i need four blues i need two yellows so i've got enough to fulfill my yellow contract then i draw the last two tiles out of my bag so i'm going to have a lot less choice going into the end of this round i've got the tea house and the muses again and that's my turn uh we'll i'll try to finish a contract this time so i will play this one and the bonus is this one which gives me a coin which is quite hot tough for me to get money i'll send my column nipple in the spot right here and now this first one i don't have any servants already so i don't get any coin i can only do the second one which is completing a contract you can see here i've got two and i can only complete one not the other at the moment other option is to of course get ideas to complete contracts so i'm choose to do that now so i will surrender to corresponding red ids i complete this and i get a point and hey money another money for me which is good right the uh the money is income oh sorry yes take my pattern just just the point so i'm gonna just put it here because um it's tight space on the right usually on the right yes okay and now we as you completed a red one we slide that down and you get to add a servant onto that leftmost spot thank you so if i go there i get coin yes okay all right i'm now going to go to the tavern i will discard the society one to gain one coin head over to the tavern so i must discard that coin i just gained in order to reduce the stress i would gain a victory point for every servant i have on one of these but i don't have any and then i can either fulfill a contract or gain ideas now i really need a fourth blue idea in order to fulfill my blue contract so i'm going to take the ideas and i get ideas matching the three colors that are there so i will get one of each color and i was hoping to do that over here but you uh i didn't really want reds and you made a red majority so that's all right i've um i've got a lot of what i need now to fulfill a couple of these contracts that's good yes all right these slide down and i am out of tiles so these are the ones i have to choose from for my final action all right my goal i want to go to society over there so this action and discarding this one to get a yellow idea and let me put my meeple there i don't want to swipe it because money is very hard for me at the moment i want to get one of the contracts plus a a blue idea so i'll take the blue idea you do also uh track that's great so this is uh these three are basically the same um i'm just going to take one of these yep so there are there are three four reds and there's a three red thank you okay so now it comes to my action my options are go to the assistants again and get a new assistant or go to the tea house and complete one of my contracts so one of my portfolios so if i if i don't do this i'm going to have a lot more stress next round but if i look at the ones i can complete i can complete yellow i can comp i can't complete red i can complete blue is red and yellow so only red or yellow can score this round and i can't win this boat stella has the she's already in the lead through being closer to the right and could possibly go there again so there's no real urgency for me to complete this blue one because it's got no income so i may actually be best off skipping the tea house this round and completing an assistant so that's what i'm going to do i'll take the assistant action i'll discard this tea house one for a blue i'm not too worried about losing my tea house ones because i took a couple last time place my scholar here that's going to give me a really big advantage on this boat i shall place my i have to pay a coin to reduce my stress down to zero place my servant here gain a another yellow and a blue so i started to really stock up to fulfill my contracts next time around that's good and then i take this assistant that's going to let me score off this tile which is nice and it's got some money income it seems like the stress kind of like at the start it's sort of easy-ish to gain or to lose sorry uh and then towards the end of the game it's getting harder as you have more unfulfilled contracts and assistance yeah i'm going to be getting four stress next time so it's it can get out of hand if you let it that's right all right it's my last turn this this round so i think as much as i want to go to get something from the assistant so i think i'm going to do this one first instead so the bonus is to lose one stress bye bye and here we go my tile is here definitely majority for that one yeah um and i will pay one coin again to actually move clockwise twice so i got a red idea and another point for me please yeah and then pay another coin to complete a contract now i have some here that i can complete i'm planning to complete my blue because i don't have enough for red so i complete the blue and i get three coins money not coins money and four points four points at the cost of four blue ideas yeah thank you thank you soon that is it okay so now we go into upkeep for the end of round two we start with the the incomes so i don't have any red portfolios i can once again spend a yellow idea to gain a victory point i now have an assistant and the bonus action there is to gain a coin yep and i have three unfulfilled contracts and one assistance so i get four stress now i have one red portfolio so i gain a coin point oh sorry a money i have a uh not yellow portfolio i have a an assistant that i can pay money which i will to gain the bonus of this question mark which is right now it's actually putting assistance to get a majority now obviously i don't want to go there i would not get majority to put in one of the boats space so this might be an easy one for me but i don't see any strong things like this is for the blue contract which i have one this is for money it might be useful i think i want to put it here just to make sure maybe that i get the majority and then i can choose blue contract over the yellow contract because you got yellow at the moment i got the blue now i get stressed so i have one unfulfilled unfulfilled contract and then one assistance so i get to poop now i'm up the four again as well then we adjust turn orders so you've jumped ahead this time so you'll go first in round three and now we purchase these tiles so again left to right you get the first two choices and then i get the next three yeah i like the idea of this the the assistant action and i think i've discarded this so i'm gonna admit to that so those two um so i've got two travels or two tea houses to choose from you've got the next three yes and i can see there's a couple of um there's a couple of mountain points coming up towards the end of the game mountains come from traveling so i think i'll grab both of those traveling actions give myself a leg up on that and one of these tea house ones this one gives me some more bonuses if i get rid of it and then now we put all of these in the bag yes so these will all go back in the bag and then we will draw four new ones to start the next round yeah okay we'll also place the new ones out but after we've done the next bits of scoring so now we again place our servants out on the boats so i put two on here and one on here i've got these ones so i'm actually doing cool this is not there yes i'm doing pretty poorly actually at controlling the points i really need to make those mountains work for me we resolve this boat here yep so this is threat contract or yellow contract because i've got one red i will put it here and discard this this goes back again yes okay that one is out we slide the boats down we add one new private boat which is uh three points per red portfolio fulfilled yep we regain our scholars and then we score so now it's time for the first round of public scoring two points per assistant and two points per red portfolio fulfilled so i get two points very good and you get four points four two and two two and two yes so it doesn't look like a lot but those will each again score three and four points later so these will eventually be nine point scores and yeah these scores are going to get up really high once we get into those later rounds when there's six different things or six of the same scoring four points each and the score track goes up well past 150.

this is why there's so many layers of strategies that you have okay you want to win the majority the battle of the cells or you want to do the action and depending what tiles you have very interesting yes right and so to finish the round we draw the new ones from here we rotate the question mark we draw the next four tiles from our bags to start our action choice for round three and and this starts getting uh more powerful see this is the tiles that we get and then this one is even even better so you can see the two bonuses option you get extra like more bonus uh and it's like it's more actions actions to choose from okay and so that is where we will bring this one round play through to a close and say there's two more pairs of rounds that work in very much the same way fighting for the majorities you know this is this is where it will really come into its own if i can make these mountains work for me and really dominate the travel action i can make up a lot of points here if one of us can make the blue portfolios work for us yeah that can also be worth a real lot here and then these private boats as they come out they'll also have a big influence um as you're taking actions towards the left of the board and i mean i've set myself up to do a lot of tea house actions so i should catch a lot of these private boats as they run through but then so have you so it's going to be quite a fight yep and that's it that's the end of our one round playthrough and that's the one round playthrough of jiangnan life of gentry we hope that you enjoy the video we do have one of stella's short and sweet videos for this game we'll put a link to that in the description below so you can check it out and also do check out the games page on kickstarter we'll put a link to that as well in the description when it's live and if you enjoyed this video please help us by hitting that like button subscribe to us you can also hit the meeple in the corner to do that and hit the bell icon so you'll be one of the first to know when we have new exciting videos you can also follow me on instagram for my board games jenny and if you have any questions comments or feedback please leave them in the comments section below see you next time