Chang'an Review: Module Theory

[music] [music] >> Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vasel and today I'm taking a look at a game called Chang'an. This is from Pendragon and Arcane Wonders and this is a game it says it's one of the during the Tang Dynasty this city is one of the largest cities in the world. And so you are building an engine to build this city.

You're helping build the city. And so this is a game in which you're going to be taking actions and getting resources stacking cards at a gate and then building them. It's a little confusing. Hopefully this helps. The game or at least the base game comes with these five decks of cards and you're going to use a certain number of these decks and mix them together.

The number of decks you use is based on the player count and mix them together. Although the deck that you make, you'll see the back of each card. Each player is going to get four cards for their starting hand. And then players are going to they also get a wheat and they get a coin. A coin is sort of a half wild resource.

On your turn as a free action if you have two coins you can turn them into take one of the four resources of your choice. Now on a player's turn they're going to take an action and this is going to keep passing around the table until the end of the game is triggered. So your actions are research, produce or build.

Now this deck here in the middle, there's going to be three cards next to it. When you research, you will be taking one card. You can take one of the face up cards or you can take the top one from the deck. Another thing you can do is you can produce. To produce you're going to play cards at one of your gates.

You can play one, two, or three cards at a gate. So let's say I play these two cards at this gate here. Once you do that this gate produces wheat. So I would get one wheat, two, three cuz it's on these cards. Let's say I had played three cards here. This card does not give a wheat, but I could still play it there if I wanted to and I would get three wheat.

You can also on your turn instead of planting them, you can move cards to the zone. So, let's say I move these two over and I would get two coins. You can also move them over as a group rather than one at a time like I showed you. So, that's production. Whenever you produce, you will also activate any cards that are there, which we'll come back to.

You can build cards. You'll take a card and put it down and the cost is here. So, the first card here costs one stone and one wood. And then I place a card here. The next one costs two stone and two wood. So, I'd put the card on top of it like that. This matters because at the end of the game two points for every card in this row, four points for every card in this row, eight cards for every point in the third row, if you have it.

And then if you have one of each of these three types in a row, you'll get some bonus points. And some cards will give you bonus points themselves. Now, like I said, whenever you go here, you'll get this resource plus any of the matching ones on the card and you also activate each of the cards. And there is a whole single reference sheet that tells you what each card does.

For example, this soldier card here would give me a wood and then it says if I have the most of these cards in my area, I would get two more wood. And you also see that this card is worth a point at the end of the game. While the drum tower card here basically says that whenever I build a building in the future, I can pay one less wood.

And the city office here there's just an end of the game thing that basically gives me a victory point for each city card built in the same district as this. The west market here, take one base resource per type from the general supply, so you see all those, and put them on your card, and I can use those cards.

And at the end of the game each card that I don't use on this gives me a victory point. And so there's a bunch of different cards in each of the different color decks has a specific style. The game is going to continue. Oh, by the way, I should mention here, you can take a card from another player from their gate.

You can't take the bottom card. So this is one card, but if there's a second card, I can pay two stone to take that card. If there's a third card, I can take pay only one stone to take that. The person you take the card from though will get a wheat in compensation. And you can also buy resources with coins.

Anyhow, the game is going to end when somebody has nine or more cards in their area. So at least two on each of these four, then a third one. At that point, we finish the round out and add up the victory points. There's also various modules that are included with the game that can be added in. What I just showed you is the base game.

>> [music] >> Before I jump into the game, man, I want to talk about the the the way it looks. This is fine. It's a nice cover. And you know what? It's funny cuz when you open it up, there's a plastic cover holding everything in place. And there's nice foldable boards. And then it stops. The resources, you saw the resources, they're pretty terrible looking.

They look like resources from 20 years ago. Why did they not look nicer? But my biggest problem is this. All the cards have symbols on them. This is a single sheet that explains what all these cards do in the six different decks including the Silk Road deck. Which by the way is really weird that they have this as a module, but it's also deck that can be thrown in.

But anyway, I digress. You will be passing this around all the time. You will not remember what the symbols are. You're like, "Well, after your first or second game." Sure, but that first game, you have one of these. That is unacceptable at this point in time. Come on. How many times do we have to say this as players that we hate this?

And companies just keep ignoring it. Like, "Oh, you don't need more than one player aid for all these cards that have symbols that no one knows what they mean." Stop it. Okay. Well, having that out of my system. But I The reason I mention this because it really does affect gameplay because other than that, I think the gameplay is very interesting and there's a neat vibe to it as you're building it up.

And I love the idea of playing you play cards out to get resources. People can steal them for two rocks, but you never feel like they just took that from you. Like, "Oh, no, they took my card from me." Because you get a wheat for for them taking it and you probably weren't going to build all three of those cards anyway.

You put those cards out there so that you can move them around and just get resources and then eventually start building them. And that's where the fun of the game is is by I'm going to take resources and I built two buildings here and now I activate both those buildings. And you can set up some really cool things.

There are these different decks. There's the The orange deck is a trade deck, the politics deck, the production deck, the science deck, the military deck, and then the module Silk Road deck. So, there's a lot of different modules and stuff in this game and this is where I think the waters get muddied and with the different decks.

And this is Let me Let me talk about my rating for this game. My rating for this game is a six out of 10. And part of that is because it just it's There's a lot of fun things to do here. But for me, it doesn't stand out too much amongst other games, especially in how it looks. And I'm going to be superficial and say the way it looks hurts a little bit, but there's also all these modules and all these pieces and you have to struggle to say which one to play and you have to take apart the decks and put them together.

And it's it's interesting. There's a lot of cool things going on, but I haven't yet played with one of these combinations of modules or something where I'm like, "That is the game." As in I'm like, "That's pretty interesting." But each time we add a new deck, we're passing this around again, and doing some cool things, but it never feels like it gels.

You're like, "Ooh, wow, I'm starting The engine's starting to get pretty cool." The game's over. And that's fine. There's a lot of games that are like that. It has some neat concepts, but for me it still feels like an older game, a game that came out 15, 20 years ago. And that's not necessarily bad.

If you ask me to play this, I'll be like, "Yeah, I'll try this game. It's not It's not terrible." But I can't really recommend it because it feels like this would be coming in second place in a game design contest. And it just it's okay. It's a little bit of engine building, but there's really cool engine building games out there.

There's a little bit of card mixing and resource management, but man, those resources look really bad. The coin being half a wild is fine, but and the modules, you know, going through them, I haven't played all the modules here, but I went through the rules for all of them. The event module is not interesting to me at all.

The progress card modules fine. The emperor's module is not even really that big of a deal. The silk module is the most interesting one, but it also adds extra rules and things. And that just feels like a whole lot of work for a lot of stuff they threw in a box. If you have all these modules, where is the best game?

Why not just put it together, make one really good game, and maybe have one module in? But there's all this stuff with an extra boards, and I find it a little bit messy, and it feels a little bit old. So, but man, getting the resource with the cards, that is neat. That's innovative, I think. And then activating the buildings underneath, that's fun.

And that keeps me from saying it's a bad game, cuz it's not. But it's also not one that I really love. So, that's Chun On. Um I'm Tom Vasel, and you're watching The Dice Tower. Hey, everybody. Thanks for watching this video. If you [music] like this review or whatever you just watched, wasn't it amazing?

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