Gùgōng

After a more than positive experience with the designer’s most recent game, Stroganov, I decide to work backwards and seek out his previous designs - finding myself this time in China, 1570. Don’t worry, you wont need to bribe me to find out what I thought of Gùgōng, I will tell you for free: It's great.

Gugong
Designer: Andreas Steding
Solo Designer: Steve Schlepphorst
Publisher: Game Brewer

How to play:

If you are familiar with Tekhenu (the splendid Egyptian themed entry in the T-series), then you will feel quite at home with Gùgōng and its seven distinct, yet intertwining, mini games. Here however, you’re taking on the role of a powerful Chinese family trying to gain influence by exchanging gifts with officials, all in the hope of gaining an audience with the Emperor.

Each of the seven individual areas of the large board have a numbered card randomly placed on them at the start of the game representing a gift that you can exchange for one of the four cards that you start the game with. You begin with six servants (or as I like to call them, ‘tiny wooden cubes that don’t look like servants’) at your disposal that you can utilise to take actions once you have made the bribe ‘exchanged gifts’ to access your chosen area.

You can’t be exchanging any old gifts though – in the spirit of bribery gift exchange you have to exchange your card for one of a lower value than your own, forcing you into situations of either being able to serendipitously take your preferred action because you have a higher value gift to exchange, or otherwise having to think through your Plan B or Plan C options because you don’t have good enough gifts in your hand to pull off your preferred exchange.

Once you have exchanged your gifts, you then get to take that area’s action and this can either be a free action or instead, a more powerful action that usually sees you having to burn one of your limited number of servants in addition to any that you will use to perform the action itself. So for example, in ‘The Palace of Heavenly Purity’ area, once I have exchanged gifts then I can either:

a) Move my Official one step up the track

b) Burn a servant and move two steps up the track and one step along the 'Intrigue' track.

…with all of the other areas having that same two tier level of action available to choose from.

The seven areas that you can exchange gifts in allow you (very broadly speaking) to:

• Travel: Move one or two spaces with an explorer on a horse, picking up randomly placed rewards each movement that you take. Rewards could include VP, or additional servants that you could then use on future turns - and other goodies.

• Build The Great Wall: take one or more of your servants and place them here to represent a section of the Great Wall that has been built. When the wall is finally completed fully then the player who has built most of it scores VP and gets to move up The Palace of Heavenly Purity (more on the Palace coming up)

• Move along an Intrigue track: there is a lot of scope in this game for tie break situations and the player furthest along the Intrigue track breaks those ties.

• Purchase Jade: the more Jade you have, the more end game points you will receive. But Jade gets more expensive the more that it is purchased.

• Claim ‘Decrees’: three levels of bonuses with increasing costs depending on the level. Firstly, bonuses that trigger at the start of each round (eg gain 2vp if you are scoring the least overall). Secondly, ongoing discounts (eg pay 1 servant less for each Jade you purchase from now on) and finally, end game scoring bonuses (eg gain 8VP at the end of the game).

• Sail along The Grand Canal: move your boat along a river, gradually adding your servants to it. Once the boat has three servants on it then you can claim a bonus based on where the boat currently is on the river. The bonuses aren’t insignificant – in particular you can gain extra gift cards into your hand (an extra turn each round) as well as getting access to a ‘Double Servant’ (basically the same as all your other servants but worth 2 for the price of 1 each time you use it).

• Climb the Palace of Heavenly Purity: move up step by step until you reach the top, claiming bonus end game VP if you are first, with lesser points available for those who reach it after you.

And that’s generally it - exchange your gifts, perform the relevant actions for whichever area you have chosen, climb the palace stairs along the way, start the next round with the cards that you received in your exchanges from the previous round, get more servants at the start of each round, gain some points along the way, gain a bigger chunk of end game points at the end of four rounds for any collections of Jade that you have as well as any Decrees that you might have claimed. Crucially though, if you haven’t made it to the top of The Palace of Heavenly Purity by the end of the game then it won’t matter how many points you have – YOU LOSE, so best get climbing those stairs!

Of course as with most Euros of this weight there are other wrinkles and rules that I shall leave you to explore in the rulebook or in a playthrough video or two…

Solo Headlines:

A simple and straightforward deck of 12 or so cards power ‘Meng’ a full scoring automa opponent. Flip a card over, take the very simple action displayed on the card, resolve any consequences of that action. Simple, straightforward stuff – very little upkeep. At the end of the round, the cards that have been used are used again to give it some secondary actions all taken in one bulk go. These add a little bit of additional upkeep to the usual end of round resetting but it’s a trade off for keeping Meng’s main actions shorter and easier during the game itself – and I prefer it that way so that its turns don’t take longer than my own and distract me from my own planning and plotting!

During my first play I felt that the rulebook perhaps (and it could just be me) made it appear that there were more solo rule exceptions than there actually were but once I had a play under my belt there wasn’t particularly anything that needed checking again or anything that was unintuitive. There are a couple of ‘remove these tiles if playing solo / if this tile comes up then instead give the automa 1vp’ things to note but nothing major at all.

Meng’s difficulty can be altered and there is also a straightforward way to give him (it?) a particular focus (e.g. concentrate on building The Great Wall, or in another game try to gain as much Jade as possible). Nice touches.

For the majority of the time it genuinely felt like I was playing against a real opponent. Games took 45 – 60 minutes and felt snappy and largely satisfying. I say largely satisfying as my only complaint if I had to find one is that the solo opponent’s scores felt quite swingy at times - and I acknowledge that this might well be due to my own poor performances game to game. But some games it was scoring 38 on Easy Mode and in others it was scoring upwards of 70. In a game that has generally quite tight scoring that felt a lot. Those (small amount) of games where Meng was absolutely racing ahead, it felt unstoppable – almost like the board layout, its card shuffle, everything was working in its favour to the point that I could just feel in my bones like I had absolutely no chance of beating it. Which left me wanting to abandon the games. It was only twice this happened in 12 or so solo games so its not something that was a constant frustration. Just a couple of games where I found the solo to be ridiculously powerful even on easy mode because of the luck of the randomised layout of the board.

That said, those two less that enjoyable games are consigned to the dustbin of my mind when compared to all the other really enjoyable solo games of this that I played. A big shout out to Steve Schlepphorst for a nicely designed solo mode here.

General Headlines:

I mentioned Tekhenu at the start of the review as there are (in my opinion) more than some similarities. This is a lighter game (medium weight to Tekhenu’s mid-heavy) but it still absolutely gives the deep diving solo player (me!) many reasons to keep this one on the table for repeat and prolonged plays. And similarly to Tekhenu, I liked Gùgōng a lot. In particular:

Gùgōng sparked a realisation about something that I hadn’t consciously noticed that I particularly enjoyed in board games: A sense of urgency to be first. And I don’t just mean in classic worker placement terms of “I want to get to that space first, damn someone else did so now I have to find another option”, though there is some of that. Here, every part of the board is screaming at me to be first. Exchange my gift first as I really want to take a particular action and cant risk someone getting there before me; be the first to complete The Great Wall so I get its points for having built there the most; be furthest ahead on the Intrigue track so that if any ties need breaking then I will win them; grab that decree before my opponent as if I don’t then it will cost me more to get it if someone else got there first, race up the Palace steps as you need to get to the top by the end of the game anyway and you get more points if you reach the top first; buy that jade quickly as it gets more expensive the more its bought so I need to get it early; get my boat moving along the river as quickly as I can so I can get those meatier rewards; reach those bonus tiles on the travel action first as the other player is getting close to them. I talked in my review of the designer’s (excellent) other game Stroganov about how much I liked how it made me feel like I was propelling forwards - wanting to be ahead of others, wanting to be first. And here is that same feeling again. But more of it. I like it.

I also really liked having to decide once I had exchanged gifts to take an action, whether I was going to take its basic action or pay a greater cost to take a meatier version of that same action – “do I push hard on this particular action now and do a little less later or do I spread things out more slowly”. Like I said before, the game begs me to be first – whispers in my ear to go ‘all in, right now’. But is that a wise thing to do? A fair few ‘Angel and Devil on my shoulder’ moments to be had.

I didn’t mention in my 'How to Play' overview that some of the cards in your hand will also possibly have an action printed on them (some don’t). So now I am in that combo sweet spot that I like so much - not only can I take the action of the area that I have exchanged gifts in, but I can also take the action of the area printed on this particular card? Erm, yes please. This is a major way to get the different areas of the board intertwining and synergising splendidly. “Im going to build on the Great Wall this turn but if I do then its tied and I would be losing the tie. Groan. But WAIT. I have a card that lets me also move up the Intrigue Track so in one move I complete the Great Wall and I move up the tie break track and that way get 3 points and move another step up the palace track which takes me to the top and now I claim those 7 points for being first”. I love a combo. This has them in spades if you play the game well.

And then there is the absolutely brilliant tightening of options as things go on. Think about it – in order to exchange one of my higher value cards from my hand I have to then take a lower one from the board. But those lower value cards then become my hand for the next round – things are going to be just that tiny bit harder next time. There are some ways to mitigate for this but even those mitigations make things tighter and tighter (eg “don’t worry this turn about having to swap for a lower valued number - swap for anything that you want. But it’s going to cost you another card from your hand so that’s one less turn this round. Urgh”). Delicious choices. I loved thinking not just about this turn, or even just this round but also about how the cards I take benefit me next round. “I wasn’t thinking about taking the travel action this turn but there is a tasty card there that would let me get some jade next round if grab it and I do want more jade”. I’m not just taking actions during each round – I am also very carefully curating my hand to use during the next round.

This is a reasonably tight game – you aren’t going to be finding yourself counting up hundreds and hundreds of points. Expect scores in the 40 – 60 region; 3 points here and there, bagging 2 extra for being first to the top of the palace stairs – slow and incremental points. Jade and Decrees score you a chunk of end game VP sure, but generally it feels like every point has been well earned.

I can see at higher player counts (particularly 4 or 5) that the ‘gifts’ on the board will change more frequently making for a lot more tactical pivots as other people take the cards that you were hoping to take. I didn’t feel playing solo or in my handful of 2p games that there was any real issue though at lower player counts - I still had to make careful choices and still saw plans unravel as cards changed, and I still felt interactivity as I played – maybe just not as much. But nothing to grumble about whatsoever.

Anything I didn’t like?

No major qualms. The only things that stuck in my mind particularly were:

The climb up the Palace of Heavenly Purity (which you have to get to the top of in order to win the game, losing completely if you fail to reach the top) didn’t particularly have the tension that it could or should have. I would have liked a couple of “oh no I don’t think I am going to make it and this is feeling very, very close to the end of the game.” It felt easy. It felt like a given. I almost didn’t have to think about it at all and still found myself at the top of it at the end. Not a biggie, and as I found out when I played the expansion, Pànjūn, this minor gripe was addressed there.

I mentioned earlier about the couple of games that I had where the solo mode felt utterly dominant because of the game setup and as I played my own game more and more it became clear to me that there were a couple of optimum setups that I also could exploit massively and just know that I was going to win the game if I did so. It felt good as a deep diving solo player to start seeing those opportunities to do well but equally they almost felt like flaws in the game that I could take advantage of in an unfair way which took a little bit of fun and ‘the unexpected’ out of the game. I mention it more probably for multiplayer games as I reckon there will be unfair runaway leader issues for those that are more in the know on what some of these exploits will be. But for the solo player I guess it would be easy enough to just adapt the game set up to try and avoid them as much as possible as you become aware of them. Again, not a biggie at all – but I did just feel this a tiny bit more in this game than I have in others.

At a Glance:

+ Clever use of cards as workers / hand management.

+ 7 distinct but easy to understand areas of the board to play with

+ Good for the deep diving solo player who wants to try different approaches and find new synergies in each game

+ A constant, driving sense of urgency to be first, everywhere.

+ Opportunity to seek out rewarding combos

+ Easy to operate solo mode

- Solo opponent’s scores a bit swingy? Some clear ways to exploit the game?

- Race to reach the top of the Palace steps felt wasn’t challenging enough.

Final Score:

8 out of 10.

Reviewed after 15 plays. (12 solo, 3 two player, 10 with one or more modules from the Pànjūn expansion which will be reviewed separately)