“Exchange gifts, send servants, and visit the Emperor in a luscious 1570 China.”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/250458/gugong
Playing Time: 2018
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement Friend Ender
Designer: Andreas Steding
Players: 1-5
Every year, I make this list, and every year, I struggle to figure out how to explain Gugong in a couple short paragraphs. It’s a weird game, but it’s also the game where you are more likely to screw over your opponents accidentally – by far. Which is to say, it’s one of the most inadvertently hilarious games in my collection.
Gugong harkens back to an era of Chinese history where political corruption was how things got done, and once the government tried to ban the practice, civil servants found a workaround. Giving bribes is illegal, but exchanging gifts? That’s fine. Whose going to notice if my gift is just a teensy bit more expensive than yours?
Gugong is broke into three rounds, and they’ll start each round with four cards. They’ll use these cards to activate worker placement spaces, by taking a gift in their hand and replacing a lower-value gift on a space they want to activate (1s beat 9s and reset the gift process for a stack). The card they picked up will be part of their hand on the next round.
The reason this creates hilarity is because your placement options are limited by the gifts in your hand. If you place an 8 on the spot I wanted to go to with my 6, it’s hilariously frustrating – and even moreso if you’re replacing a ‘2’ and could have easily placed a less valuable card. And yet, almost every transgression is accidental in nature, which just piles onto the fun.
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