Game Review – Yunnan

Yunnan
Number of Players	2 - 5
Play Time	90 Minutes
Ages	12 Years and up

This time I wanted to take a look at Yunnan, an Argentum Verlag game.

In Yunnan the players are tea traders in the city of Pu’er in ancient China.  As the person in charge of the trading company you are trying to get your tea to the farthest markets in order to make the most profit so you can build your wealth and prestige.  You have to watch out for the inspector in the provinces because they will send an unlucky trader back to the home province where they will earn less for their tea.

Yunnan is a worker placement game.  The players take turns placing their worker in order to purchase more workers, better horses, more border passes, greater influence, and structures or to become traders.  Once the players have placed all of their available workers they the move the workers that they have made traders along the trade route.  They can only send them as far as they quality of their horses and their border passes will allow.  After the all of the traders have been moved, the inspector visits the province that will generate the most income during the turn and sends back one of the traders back to the home province.  The player with the most influence under four and that does not have a tea house moves one of their traders back to the starting city.  The players then receive their income which they can convert to cash or victory points.  The game ends when someone reaches 80 victory points.  In addition to converting income to victory points, the players can receive three victory point gift if they make some of the early deliveries of tea in the provinces farther along the trade route.  The can also get 12 victory points for each tea house they establish.  The tea house also has the additional benefit of protecting the player who places it on a province from the inspector.

 I found that even though the game tries to limit it a number of ways it becomes a rich get richer game.  The key to victory coming from how quickly a player can move from building up the number of workers they have and how far they can move up the trail each turn.  The more workers a player has in the provinces, the more money they have to work with and the more they can get in the auctions with workers that they have available.  The game tires to mitigate this by shifting player order between the auction and placement phases of the game, but it does not eliminate the problem.

One of the interesting things about the game is the way that they make a player choose to use the points they score during a turn as either victory points or money.  Early in the game you need to convert the points to cash in order to win the auctions to increase your abilities, but as the game progresses you gain more points than you need to convert to money so they get converted to points.  This makes the game speed along once one of the players starts to claim a large number of victory points.  The mechanic also makes it more important to get the bonus points from the presents for being one of the first people to a province and the tea houses.

The game can be fun to play is you like worker placement games, but for the money there are better worker placement games out there to give a try to first like Coal Baron and Russian Railroads.  However if you are looking for a worker placement game that is low on strategy but high on tactics Yunnan definitely fits that category.