Pingyao: First Chinese Banks

I backed Pingyao mostly for its theme and, once the dismissive comments from playtesters and people close to the designer started arriving, I began looking at my Kickstarter pledge with that familiar, expensive melancholy. So I sat down to read the rules with half a heart. They are not always easy — clearly they were not originally written in English, and some passages are awkward — but the reading delivered a pleasant revelation: there is a game in here. And a good one, at that.

At its core, it is a simple, tight dice-placement game. The value of each die genuinely matters, rather than merely serving as a ticket to claim a space. Your choices revolve around where to place your dice and how to use their values, while trying to build your own economic engine, thematically tied to the first banks of the Qing dynasty.

The board changes along with the spaces being activated, and those shifts feed the economy each player is building. That makes the decisions properly competitive: you are not simply playing your own small, isolated puzzle, but watching how the situation moves and where you can extract value. Once you understand how everything comes together, the game gains an honest depth and appears to offer more than one route toward strong scoring.

We enjoyed it quite a lot on our first play. My only reservation is that it may not have enormous replayability — not that I personally care all that much, but let us do some objective journalism. At least the Kickstarter package also included a second, equally heavy box labelled “expansion.” I have not explored it yet, so we will see whether there is more substance in there.