Check out my final thoughts

My d4 DICE reviews are a quick and easy to digest review of a board or card game. Along with a brief introduction to the game I use DICE as an acronym for Duration, Interaction, Complexity and Engagement to quickly explore a game. Enjoy!

Player count: 1 player
Play time: 30-45 minutes
Designers: Shem Phillips
Publisher: Garphill Games

Legacy of Yu is set during the reign of Emperor Yu and the time when ancient China was plagued by devastating floods along the Yellow River. You play as Yu the son of Gun. Gun tried for nine long years to calm the deadly floods with dams and dikes. He ultimately failed and his employment came to a questionable end. Yu has inherited his Father’s work and learning from the failures of Gun sets out to create a series of canals to divert the river and quell the deadly flow. 

Legacy of Yu is a solo only, fully resettable campaign game with elements of worker placement, deck building and hand management. In Legacy of Yu, you will be using workers to perform various actions, collect resources and build canals whilst using your deck of citizens cards to aid you in this task. Each time your deck runs out the flood advances. If the Flood ever hits a point where you have not built a canal, you lose. Build all the canals and survive to the end of the round, you win. Your workers can be used to perform various actions and to fight off barbarians which are a constant threat and forever hindering your advancement. When you defeat a barbarian you gain certain rewards/resources. There are several different buildings you can construct to unlock “beginning of round bonuses” such as more workers and resources. Constructing certain buildings opens up more worker placement spots for you to use and additional slots to slot in cards that will, on future turns, grant you additional rewards at the beginning of each turn. 

Various cards will link to story elements contained with the story book. These stories will remove cards, add new cards, add new gameplay elements and new mechanisms to the game as it progresses. Depending on the result of the end game (win/lose) this will also provide narrative elements to the game and various elements being added. 

The campaign is fully resettable with no components of the game being destroyed during your playthrough. However, there are branching/random narrative elements so successive playthroughs will provide different gameplay experiences as certain cards/mechanisms will come out in a different order or new elements added not seen previously. 

The above hopefully gives you a good idea of how the game works and is not intended to be a full rules explanation. 

d4 D.I.C.E. Review

Duration

Each game session will take around 30 – 45 minutes. You will play until you have either won or lost a total of seven games. There is a lot of game here and the campaign can be reset and played again.

Interaction

It is a solo only game so there is no other player interaction.

Complexity

The main rule set is not overly complex. There a some symbols to learn but they are fairly intuitive for the most part and I did not find myself needing to consult the rulebook after my first game. There is come complexity in maximising your moves and resources however, which you get to grips with pretty quick after a game or two

Engagement

I found the whole experience a very engaging game. The introduction of the story book and the narrative elements kept me coming back for more. The core gameplay loop is one big puzzle as you are trying to balance a number of things all at once.