Ringyō - Board Game Preview
Transcript
Hello everyone. This is Johannes.
And this is Senna.
And you are watching Board Gaming Ramblings.
And today we are taking a look at Ringyo.
We are. This is an upcoming game from Paris and Games. This is of course a prototype. So everything can change. We don't know how much, we don't know what will change, all of that, the usual spiel. And of course it was sent to us from the publisher to make this preview of the game. This game is called Ringyo, which is pronounced somehow like that. We don't know exactly, but it means forestry. So basically it's a second game called Forestry in a year.
Mhm.
And this game is about forestry as well. You're going to have this player board here with different forests on them, different trees. He's not called different forests, different trees on them that you want to cultivate to grow and you want to cut them down to build buildings. And you want to change flood into rice paddies so you can get rice income. So you can use that to get more workers. And that is kind of what you're going to do. The game is going to work like this. Every round every player is going to choose one of these priority cards face down. You're going to flip them up. It's a blind auction and the player with the highest number is going to be first in player order and so on and so forth. If they have the same you're going to flip flop around. And there is a bonus or a cost to pay depending on the number that you choose. Then you will choose a bonus card from over here and you will start the round or the action phase. The action phase of the game is simultaneous play. You will be using these workers. You have different kind of workers. They do have them different names. I think like villager, artisan, I think it is saying reading on the sheets here right there.
On these gray player rates. I think it's gold and it's a yellow samurai and a green samurai.
Yeah.
Basically the samurais are permanent workers. You're going to start with two of these yellow samurais and these other ones are one time use. So when you use them they go back to the supply. What they will be doing is that they have a one, two, or three actions they can do. You always have to place adjacent to tree areas like this and then you can do actions in the area. So let's say I place this villager. It can do one action, which means I can choose to do one action in one of the three areas adjacent to it. And depending on the type of worker you place, they can do more and more like advanced actions. Most of the things you will be doing is to cut down the trees, grow more trees, or plant more trees, grow the trees that are there already higher. Uh I don't know how that works like in real life.
Giving them more nutrition.
That might be it. Same thing the flooding into rice paddies, you will be taking the um trees that you cut down and you'll be building buildings. There are two different buildings. There are the farms that you build on the rice paddies to get more rice and also the um barracks or something like that.
Fortress.
Fortress. Fortress of magic. Without the magic part, only of war. And you can use those war tokens that you get every round to get more tiles to place around here to expand on your area. When all the players have done their actions, you're going to resolve the weather and you're going to have a weather forecast that tells you uh how much of a chance there is for each of the different areas to activate, basically. So, you're going to flip over a card here and it's going to say beach. So, and it could also say like sea. Let's do the sea here. Which then is going to be different each the car the card depending on the card. Well, the beach is always going to be the beach. And then you will activate that uh type of area. So, let's just say we have sea now, you will activate the orange area here. So, you will start at the top, which is easiest. If there's a rice paddy, that will give you a rice. If there is a tree there already, that tree will grow higher to a maximum of five.
If there is an empty space, it will get a flood. And if there is already a flood there, then the flood will flood down. And depending on the card out here, it will flood. So, here like it has two spaces it can go to. Right now, you would see it would go to this one since it's the second option. But let's say we had this tree over here now and you would get another flood going down there. That would happen. The tree would would fall down. You would lose that tree and it would be exchanged with a flood. And that is basically what's going to happen in that phase. Then you're going to go over to the demand phase where is a scoring round where in this order you can activate different scoring goals paying different resources for that. And I think you're going to be two more at the end of each round. And at the end of that you're going to start a new round of the final round. The player with the most points is the winner.
The main part of the game is simultaneous play. So it's not a lot of interaction in this game, but it's very tense when you're choosing what card you want because that gives you like the first bid dibs for these bonuses. And it also decides who goes first in the scoring phase at the end of each round. That feels pretty powerful to be the first player.
I have to say that it feels like especially that part works better with more than two. Even though as we said most of the game is going to be this simultaneous thing where it doesn't matter how many players you are, but this part feels more fun with more than two. Because in many games like this and not like this, but in many games when you have two players, it's like all or nothing. Like there's only two positions. There's only like two options. So what you get to do and especially with two players there's only one spot for each of these.
Yeah.
So let's say there is like one that is super good out there and one that might not be that good in that position. If you end up being first that round you get both that and you get the first dibs to go for this. And depending on how the game falls and depending on how the game is that might might do the fact that you can do more of this and block the other player from doing them. But with more players you have a bit more leeway in both okay, there's a middle ground. I might not just do like the maximum. I might do in two players it's like do I care about this enough to to do them a high one or do I not? So with more players you get a bit more of that interesting uh decision space. And also, it doesn't add too much play time to the game.
Absolutely. The core puzzles, I think, is really good because the different workers work in like different ways.
The different workers have different like layers of actions they can do. As always in any simultaneous action game, it's very important to to remember what you did and remember what the different actions can do. And also, the fact that I can activate with this I can activate two different ones. I can't activate the same twice. It's very easy sometimes in the beginning to be like, "Oh, I'll cut this down and then I have the things I need so I'll build there." But you can't. You have to place another worker adjacent to that to be able to build there. I feel like there is a couple different big strategies and you can like balance them out is an interesting part of the game as well.
Yeah, and you can go like heavy for one or focus a little bit on both. But the main like two strategies, I would say, is cutting down your trees and
not cutting down your trees.
Yeah, but to to cut down your trees, you do that because you want to build these buildings. And the buildings are like kind of like a tech tree. So, when I've built this, then I can build like the ones adjacent to it. And the higher up, the more points and the better bonuses you get. And the other strategy, as you said, is not cutting down your trees and moving on this other tech tree kind of like this track. And the higher up you get, the more points you will get for the trees that are left on your player board at the end of the game. And you can like go heavy for one thing or you can try to balance and do a little bit of both.
Now, something about your manage to balance it pretty well, but you ended up having very few trees on your player board at the end. So, even though you would have gotten quite a few points for them, you didn't have too many left. But then you managed to build like three of the four buildings at the top. That got you like 30 points just doing that. So, there is a lot of that balance here, which I really enjoy. There is a thing that you need to be okay with in this game, which is like some luck and risk management. It's more risk management than it is pure luck.
Yes.
And that is with a river basically. Because if you do a mistake, especially in the first round, if you end up doing a big mistake in the first round, you will have your own water park. And that is not the name of the game. The name is forestry, not water park.
It could have been water park. Some of the games we played
But you [clears throat] will not win if you have a water park. What will happen if you do any of those boo-boos in the beginning? I had one game where I hadn't seen this one thing that might happen, and it did happen. Because as we said in the overview, when you activate, let's say we would activate this light this What is this color? I don't know what it's called in English.
Cypress. That's the That's the tree.
Like the tree.
I don't remember the name of the color. But let's say I would would do that and this was not there, but I had like a big tree there, and then I would get one of my my I would get a flood there. It would happen again. There's a flood there. So, I activate it again because it's a high chance it will happen. Then this will get flooded. Oh, it's activated again, and this will die, and you will just like lose all your things going down. So, the the trying to look at this and you cannot ignore it is basically what I'm saying.
And of course you can
be unlucky. If like you're saying, oh, probably it's not going to be the one that's a 10% chance. It's one of 10 cards. You because you cannot use all your actions to only try to negate this.
Well, you can ignore those if you just like you spend like the first round removing every flood, replacing them with trees or rice paddies. And but
But then you didn't [clears throat] ignore it. You You built yourself up to do not have to
Yeah, but then you would be okay. Like whatever cards come up, you can like do like you can do that and but I think is interesting to see like
[clears throat]
how many of these floods do I need to remove right now. What are the chances that they will make a huge water park? Which ones can I ignore? I think like the few few last times we played I kind of like cracked the code that I it's fine to have water down there because they will not trickle like destroy more of my forestry and I I need to like manage these on top here.
Yeah, it's it's going down like it's cascading. So that's what happens if you get like a water park is that you end up something's happening and it just like takes everything with it and it falls down. This is a prototype so there are things that might change. There are a few of the scoring cards because you can get some scoring cards. You get one in the beginning. There's a few ways to get more. You're able to score three of them at the end. There's a few of them that feels a bit weird. Like there is one here that says military power that if you build eight plus fortresses which is building eight of your 12 buildings as a fortress, you will get 13 points. It's pretty hard. I tried doing it once. It's very hard. Then you have another one which is city building which is farms and fortresses and if you have seven of them you get 11 points. So it's like if you build whatever buildings you get like two less points than if you build only the one building. It seems a bit weird. It might be something that we just haven't understood or they might change it. I don't know but I would there's a couple of these but not a huge thing overall. But just know that that is there as well as we like that little luck risk management factor. But the game isn't too long. So it's not like you're sitting there for three hours and trying to to break back and I think there are ways if you don't go into a full on water park like I did one time. I think there are ways to get back into the game. And with that we hope that you got a good feeling about the game.
If you have any questions about it you can let us know in the comments and we will answer you with our keyboards. And also, if you have you have other things you want to know about the game, you can check out the link in the description to the campaign. If you are interested in seeing more about the game, you can go there. If you are not interested in seeing more about the game, you can play some of the other games that you already own, because you can't have them all.
Mhm.
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Yes, like the video. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Johannes.
I'm Signe.
And you've been watching Board Gaming Ramblings, and bye-bye.