Disclaimer: I worked for WhatsYourGame at Spiel'14, explained ZhanGuo there for four days in a row and afterwards got the game for free. Since I've been exposed to this game a lot I may have been fallen victim to the Stockholm syndrome and my impression of it could be scewed. So take this whole review with a grain of salt...
Game: ZhanGuo is a classic eurogame designed by <PERSON> and <PERSON>. It is set in ancient china where the players work for the emperor to unify the five warring states (=<PERSON>) of china in writing, currency and law to form one strong empire. During the course of the game you'll gather resources, choose among various actions, place your tokens (walls, palaces and governors) all over the board and hopefully score massive amounts of victory points at the end of the game.
Rules: ZhanGuo is played over five rounds. At the start of each round each player draws two cards from each of the three decks (the first contains ivory colored cards with low numbers, the second the medium orange ones and the third the high numbered brown cards). Then you take turns by either playing one card onto your own player board (which increases your power in the empire and sets up stronger turns for later) or discarding the card and choosing one of six different actions which either nets you additional resources on your own board or allows you to spend your resources to place walls, palaces and governors onto the main game board. When you discard a card and the number on it is either lower or higher (depending on the chosen action) than the one played before, you also get the opportunity to activate the cards on your own board matching the chosen action and get extra bonuses. During their turns the players will collect tokens of three different colors (ivory, orange and brown). After each player has played all of his six cards the round ends and the players with the most tokens of each color get rewarded by the emperor in exchange for their tokens. Additionally, various actions in the game increase the unrest in a region towards you. If your unrest is above a certain threshold some actions are blocked and you can't activate your cards until you decrease the unrest again. For a more detailed rules explanation, check out <PERSON> video on Youtube.
Story: I first came in contact with ZhanGuo when it was revealed to me that I would have to teach it at Spiel'14 in Essen. The next few days I spend some time researching the game and familiarizing myself with the rules before I finally got to play it with the other explainers. 629
The first few games I struggled to find a coherent strategy but for now I just stick to a very basic approach: Try to stack cards with the same activation-condition on your board and then just see where it leads to. So far that worked well and I usually end up among the top players at the table. I have to admit, that I only have played ZhanGuo with the same few people yet and that I probably never will get it on the table with my siblings. As soon as they see the load of components and catch a glimpse at something that could be a final-scoring-system combined with an explanation that takes above 150 words, they're basically out of the door.
Positive: As an eurogame ZhanGuo offers a pretty low entrance barrier and could be a great gateway game to introduce your table to more complex games. Once everybody understands the card activation mechanic and is able to chain the effects of different cards together into a perfect symphony, you will enjoy trying to set up stronger, better and bigger turns. Despite the low entrance barrier the game has enough deepness build into it to get very tactical especially with only two players. You start watching the color of the cards your adversaries are holding, count up their reward-tokens, take a guess at what they're most likely to do next and try to sequence your own turns to block theirs. I also like the decreased randomness in the game by splitting the cards into three decks. You always get low, medium and high cards. Sometimes you will get screwed by getting the highest of the low or the lowest of the high cards, but in this situation you can always blame the player who discarded the last card and get the table talk going. Keep in mind that the game is set up randomly at the start, so that you have to find a new strategy every time. If you want to have a more complex game, a quick flip of the playerboards reveals the unique special abilities of each board. These get auctioned off with victory points at the beginning of the game. It is worth mentioning that the rulebook is very well structured and written. After the first quick read you will easily know how the game is played and the very few side cases can be found quickly by flipping through the pages. 629