With four of us tonight, we decided to try this new game by Cyril Demaegd and self-published under the label Ystari Games. The game is all about placing your brokers into areas of a city, to exert the most influence in order to gain gems and victory points.

The board shows a city which is divided into four quarters and each quarter into 3 areas: port, commercial and palace areas. Separately there is also a market where you can place brokers to manipulate the price of gems. There are four main types of gem, red, yellow,green and blue whose price can be manipulated, plus there are black gems which can be won only at the ports and white gems which can be traded for any of the main gems. Each player has 11 brokers with values between 0 and 4. There is also a deck of character cards which players can win in the 4 palace areas, and these give advantages to the owner in later rounds. A game round consists of setting up the gems and character cards available to be won in the current round; bidding for turn order using two of your brokers; playing your brokers into the city or market areas - two brokers at a time until everyone has played 8 brokers; paying out gems, VPs and character cards to those with the most influence in each area; and adjusting the price of gems in the market. The game lasts four rounds after which gems are converted to VPs based on their relative value and whoever has the most VPs is the winner.

In our game, I got off to a pretty good start in the first two rounds, picking up some useful VPs cheaply in the commercial areas and some gems. However, my gems were the least valuable. Chris seemed to be keen to manipulate the prices at market and pick up the odd gem of the more valuable colours here and there. In the third round, Mark in particular picked on me, as he viewed me as the leader, and I had a disastrous round. Nige continued to concentrate on black gems, which paid a fixed price (in VPs) at the end of the game, based on how many you had collected. However, the final round was the critical one. In this round, the palce areas each pay out one white gem and Chris decided he wanted these, a feat he achieved relatively unopposed. He also picked up a white gem from the market and by careful allocation of these to the most valuable colour he moved from having the third-most gems in that colour to having the most. As he also had the most gems in the second-most valuable colour, he cruised past us on the scoreboard for a great win. The white gems individually don’t make that much difference but allowing him to win five had a huge effect.

We all quite liked Ys: It is fairly easy to understand your goals and there are multiple ways to achieve progress in the game. It took a little bit longer than we would have liked ideally but it is a good debut from M. Demaegd.