I was curious about this tile laying game (tile laying is one of my favourite mechanisms) and was happy to be able to catch a demo at Spiel '23. Hubby Yves and I got to try this as a 2-player game. When I was preparing for Spiel, the rules weren’t available yet, but someone was happy to walk us through them. And the rules aren’t complex at all, so we were up and running in no time.

Tile laying, area majority and special actions

In Medang players build a temple of tiles that come in 5 colors and with different specialists on them (I think 5 as well but I’m not sure I recall correctly) and with values from 1 to 5 (but the specialists have the same value throughout the game, so a monk will always be value 3 for instance). Depending on the number of players, you will have different blueprints of temples available. A blueprint tells you how many columns you will be building and how tall (how many tiles) each column will have to be. The game ends when the blueprint is complete. A row of number tiles indicates how many tiles each column needs to have, so it’s easy to keep track.

Each player represents a dynasty (a color, kept secret from other players) and try to get their color to have the best score. Scoring happens at the end of the game, both for rows and for columns, but each scores differently. In a row you get points for your highest tile (so the one in the highest position), for each tile of the same or lower value beneath it. The rows score for majority. Turns are simple: you place a tile (but you can’t add a tile to a column that’s complete – that has the number of tiles it needs to have according to the blueprint/the number tile at its bottom), choose to activate the tile’s effect or not, and take a new tile from the market. The fun resides of course in the abilities of the different tiles and how you can use those to manoeuver your tiles into the best position for scoring, or mess up your opponents’ plans. The artisan (tile with value 1) lets you play an additional tile that turn, the merchant (value 2) lets you take a tile from the market (in addition to the one you will get at the end of your turn), the monk (value 3) lets you swap the monk tile with another tile in the temple of its color, or with a tile of a different color of value 1, 2 or 3. The general (value 4) lets you remove an adjacent tile from the game, and finally the leader (value 5) lets you refresh the market of 6 six tiles or discard the tiles from your hand and draw a new hand of tiles.

Loved it, but some questions about scaling for lower player counts

We both enjoyed this game a lot and regretted that it wasn’t for sale at Spiel… it should be released in a couple of weeks though. But… while we enjoyed our play, we also felt the game was lacking as a 2-player game. First the good stuff. The game plays fast and the different abilities of tiles make it an interactive game as you try to manoeuver your own tiles in the best position, while trying not to reveal your dynasty to the opponent(s). You will try to guess what dynasty the other players represent, but it might not be so obvious as all players play tiles of all available colors. And while you try to get your own tiles in good scoring positions, you will not let go of opportunities to thwart the chances of other colors to score big. In a 2-player game, you don’t know if you’re messing up the right color to mess up your opponent’s plans, as there are 5 colors in the game. I suppose that in a 4- or 5-player game this will feel more rewarding as you will always be hindering some opponent with your move. The thing that mostly bothered us in our play, was the fact that there is no scaling according to the number of players: whether you are playing a game with 5 or a game with 2, all the colors are in the game and all the tiles are in the stack. But a temple blueprint for two players is smaller than the blueprints for larger groups, so you will only see about half the tiles in the game… And in our playthrough, that resulted in a great number of frustrating rounds for me: I had the blue dynasty and it took at least 6 rounds before the first blue tiles came out: I had none in my starting hand of 4 tiles and there were none in the market of 6 tiles. And in our game, no leader tile came out, which would have been a way to get rid of hand tiles and the market in order to cycle through the pile of tiles more easily, in the hope of finding a couple of blue tiles.  By the time the blue tiles did start to come out, I snatched every blue tile that came into the market, which obviously gave away my dynasty color to Yves.  

This is just based on one play of course, I’m not sure if this issue came up in playtesting, but I would be surprised if it didn’t… Maybe the tiles weren’t shuffled well, maybe it was just a case of extreme bad luck, but I feel that a game with such a wide range of player number might be served with some scaling, like removing at least one color of the five available in the game when playing this as a 2-player game. If it’s not in the rules, I think it could be easily house ruled of course.