Under Huang''s new title, Yellow & Yangtze, the spiritual sequel to strategy board game Tigris & Euphrates, will finally be available next year.
Yellow & Yangtze swapped Tigris & Euphrates square grid for pagodas, slightly softened its infamously brutal clash between players, making it easier for those crushed by their opponents to catch up.
With the addition of yellow wild points, Knizia''s signature scoring twist - in which players only count the number of points accumulated for their lowest-scoring of four different colours - remained with the help of a slew of improvements.
Following the publisher Grail Games'' release in 2018, Yellow & Yangtze only saw a single print run, resulting in the game going out-of-print. Tigris & Euphrates was similarly absent from widespread availability following Z-Man Games'' decision to come up with its five Knizia titles in early 2021.
Grail Games similarly announced in April 2021 that its reprints and new editions of Knizias games had been suspended due to a lack of sales. However, Knizia claimed over the summer that the decision to pull the games had been his own, claiming that misleading communication had resulted in the termination of the licenses. A representative for Grail Games later confirmed that the rights for Knizias games published by the company had been returned to the designer.
Yellow & Yangtze is finally due to receive a return as part of Phalanx, the new publisher behind the Discworld: Ankh-Morpork remake of Nanty Narking, and the upcoming Vietnam War game Purple Haze.
Huang appears to refer to Warring States China''s games setting rather than the two rivers that travel through the country. (Thanks, BoardGameGeek.) Huang translates into English as either yellow or emperor depending on the characters used, with the board games'' minimalist box artwork appearing to indicate the latter.
In early 2023, the publisher plans to begin a Kickstarter for Huang. A deluxe version of the crowdfunding campaign will replace the standard games leader tiles with five miniatures representing anthropomorphic animals from the Chinese zodiac.
Three planned expansions will be followed by the first being a Royal Palace, which acts as a unique pagoda miniature with its own rules. Phalanx has confirmed that the expansion will be exclusive to Kickstarter, with the remaining two expansions scheduled to be announced during the campaign.
