by DuGuWei

Editor’s note: With apologies to the designer, I’m publishing the diary they submitted in 2022 and that I have somehow overlooked until now. —WEM

My name is DuGuWei, a Taiwanese boardgame designer and the creator of Yin Yang and Mount Tai. Diversity and variability are always the first things when I design. Players must find the best strategy and flexibly respond to the opening in each game. At the same time, I’ve done a lot to tell a story, hoping that my game can fully immerse players in it.

Stefan Feld and Vlaada Chvátil are my role models, and my design style has been greatly influenced by these two masters.

Topic and Mechanism

Yin Yang is my second game. I have always been committed to integrating oriental culture into strategy games. The backstory of

Yin Yang is based on “I Ching” — a 3,000-year-old text using divination by turtle shells and coins as a dice-like mechanism. The results in “I Ching” are based on the arrangement and combination of coins to determine the Will of God.

Yin Yang uses this feature in three separate phases of the game and is used differently each time. Players will be throwing six coins for divination, using the two sides as the “Yin” or “Yang” values. Players will arrange the same six coins across phases in different combinations to provide different effects, and these game actions are also subtly based on actual divination results listed in “I Ching”.

Yin Yang uses Zhou Dynasty as the historical background because “I Ching” was so popular at that time. More specifically, the game uses the seven regions of the Warring States Period as the background for regional control, and also uses the four most valuable goods of this period as the resources players are fighting over.

Design and Playtesting

Yin Yang was designed in 2018. It was originally an abstract game, using eight divination results to combine different actions and moving directions, slightly similar to the multiplayer version of [thing=624]

Quoridor[/thing]. This version was quickly dumped by me after a playtest as I didn’t find it interesting!

After that, I rebuilt Yin Yang as a strategy game. A flash of inspiration led me to use two different permutations to present the game’s action, and to use “Bingo” to unlock the player’s individual scoring items. At that moment, I knew that the game would develop into a work that I would be satisfied with. In fact, the final look of the game is not very different from my original design for this version…but it wasn’t easy to make the details perfect.

After I removed possible bugs and increased the flexibility of how players can deal with unlucky situations, the publishing house signed the contract. The suggestions they gave to me included the design of spell cards, the design of solo rules, and the design of small expansions for the Son of Heaven (Tiānzì) event.

Prototype

I’m not good at using graphics software, and iterations of Yin Yang were my first ten works. (I was just starting to practice graphics software at that time.)

You might be surprised to learn that in an early prototype, the board was drawn with crayons, and this version made me fail so many submissions! Luckily, the design was still favored by several publishing houses, among them BGnations, the one that I finally decided to co-operate with.

BGnations focuses on oriental elements in art, and they even invited a professional to write the title of the game box in calligraphy. At first, I wanted the publication to carry a luxurious feeling, but after Playtest Taiwan 2019, based on feedback from players, I decided to set the tone for an ancient feeling. Since there is water and road transportation in the game, the “yin yang” map formed by lake water and land was selected on the cover design. Hoping to make gameplay more intuitive, many UI details have been adjusted and upgraded.

I’m hoping you can give Yin Yang a try. It will knock your socks off!

Take care,

DuGuWei