
At the Gates of Loyang
A game by Uwe Rosenberg
Growing vegetables and selling vegetables were two quite different things, and his parents had never let him forget it. As a boy, he not only helped his father with the harvest—an easier process, in his opinion—but had also accompanied his mother at their makeshift vegetable stand at the Luoyang gates, watching her receive the largesse, or ire, of their patrons. “And you gave that casual customer my leeks?” the regular customers would grumble, and his mother would murmur an apology and pay them two coins for their trouble.
Nonetheless he knew his family was still making the smallest of profits and assiduously saving the money, in accordance to what Confucius had said: “When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.” But Confucius was long gone, and so were his parents, and the work of growing and selling vegetables was now solely his responsibility.
I never thought I’d be so enamored of a game about vegetables, but this game is just superb. Beat-your-own-score engine builders are slowly chipping away at my preference for narrative games.
In the game In the Gates of Loyang you are a farmer trying to advance up the path of prosperity by growing and selling vegetables. (I can’t imagine this is historically accurate—though you have at your disposal an awful lot of untilled land—but I digress.) You also have a particularly finicky set of customers who actually demand money from you if you can’t satisfy their demands, so you commit to a customer very carefully. Some form of polyculture farming is key.
