Game Review – Yedo

Yedo is a game that combines auction/bidding and worker placement game elements into one game.  The theme is centered on the city of Edo during the Tokugawa Shogunate.  The players take the roles of rival clans in the city that are trying to gain the most prestige (victory Points) by the end game by completing mission or spending Mon (money) on gifts from overseas.

The game takes place over a number of phases.  The first phase is the auction where you can acquire some of the items you need to complete your missions, action cards that give you one use special actions, annexes that give you repeatable special actions at the cost of a worker during the worker placement phase, additional workers, and additional mission cards.

Once the auctions are done then the event card for the turn is drawn.  The events can be good or bad things, such as making the cost of weapons from the market cheaper or closing one for the regions in the city for a turn.  Most of the events in the deck appear to be bad.

The next phase is the worker placement phase in which the players place their workers in spots in any of the six regions on the board.  Each region has a limited number of spaces for workers to be placed in and provide and in each region that are actions that can be done to affect things in the game.  You may also need to have a worker in a specific region to be able to complete a mission.

After the workers are placed, then the guard is moved.  It moves one region either clockwise or counterclockwise depending on where you are during the game. To further complicate players may affect the movement of the guard with action cards that they may have acquired.  The guard removes the workers in a region on which it lands and it goes back to the player if he only has 2 workers or goes in to the recruitment pool to be able to be bought again on a future turn.

Then the players get to complete their actions for the turn by removing one of their workers from one spot on the board and taking the action for that location.  These actions can be given up to complete a mission that requires that player to be in the specific region.

The game last 11 turns during which time the players need to get the most prestige points.  The player with them most prestige points by the end of the game is the winner.  The missions are the most important thing to manage to game money and prestige points.  There are four decks colored green, yellow, red, and black.  The green cards are the easiest to complete and the black are the hardest to complete.  Each mission card requires the player to collection a number of different elements, such as a worker on a specific location, a weapon of a specific type, or a blessing.  The green cards are the easiest requiring the least number of elements to complete and the black are the hardest require many different elements to complete.  The rewards are better the more difficult the card is and include things like money, prestige, and cards.  The money element from the mission is very important.  If you are not completing one card a turn for during the first 6 turns of the game money will be very tight for you for the entire game.

The things that I like about the game are the work placement and the guard blocking a region each turn so you have to plan your game out in advance of the turn you are currently in.  It also plays well as a five player game.  I have run into many games that say they are five player but turn out to be better as a four player game so to run into a game that appears to play just as well at five players as it does at four players is a big plus for me.

There are two things that I do not like about Yedo.  The first is that there are not enough green missions to be evenly distributed to all players at the beginning of the game.  One of the first things that is done are that each player gets to take 4 missions.  The distribution that I have generally seen is three green missions and one either red or black mission. If this is done there are not enough green missions in the game for the fifth player to get any green missions and they are put at a disadvantage in the early turns of the game.

The other thing I do not like about the game is the length on the game.  At five players the game last around 180 minutes.  In the sessions that I have played the players start getting restless at around turn 8.  It just seems to me to be a bit too long.

Overall for game elements and theme I give it an A, for game play I give it a B.  I would definitely play it again given the opportunity and would recommend it to people that I know who like this type of game.