Tips yokai

Phase of the game

This game is about optimizing the moves and informations given in order to win (as fast as possible).

The game has three main phases:

- the early game (turn 1/2 of each player) where few information are available for each player ;

- the mid game (turn 2/3/4 of each player) where players start to understand exactly where all the final colors will be ;

- the late game where players finish the job by moving the last few tiles.

General

The most important thing to understand is during the early game, the goal is to give informations to others players. More the game advance, and less what you check is important, and more the movement is.

During early game, you want to be obvious in what you did. During late game, you want to be effecient. This is less true at high level table because you can understand more easily what a tricky move does (and so be more effecient even in early game).

During mid game, the goal is to optimise the deplacement by trying to gain one turn by moving a card which will link cards of same colors. Per example if you got 4 cards put as a L, and the one in the up and the two in the down of the L are the same color ; you can try to move the middle one, and replace it with a card of the same color of the three others.

Hints meaning

If a red hint is available, and a red/purple hint is available, you can assume using the red/purple hint for red is straight up bad. That mean you can use red/purple to said it's purple.

For the same reason, if a red/purple/green hint is available, and a red/purple is available, you can use the red/purple/green hint for 100% green.

Hints placement

Putting a hint block the tile which can't be moved anymore. Which mean if you block a single card which is red/green/blue, the other players will not be able to know what it is during a very long time. So it's very bad. Without the level 2 variant, the main rule is to only lock a card if you got 2+ cards of the next color next to it. If the hint you want to put is clear on what it is (=at lower level, a hint with only one color), you can lock a single tile on it, especially if it's very early, because it will give lots of early info which is very valuable.

Peeking the right tile

The main point of a start is to try to optimise your turns 3/4. It's some turns when you can easily have more than one tile to move. To do that, you want to peek at tiles which will be one-away to touch. So you could per example look at a1 and a3. That let you have some 'in-between' tiles which will touch 2/3 differents colors, which will reduce the amount of tiles you need to move.

If you have no good move to do before peeking, usually don't peek at a tile you can't move.

If your first peek find you a pair which isn't next to each other, try to plan a move to do to regroup your pair, once that's done, peek next to the card you plan to move:

• if the card is the same color of the pair, move the pair the other way around
• if the card is single, do the move you planned
• if the card make you find another pair, try to do that later pair first: if your teammates pay close attention to your peeks and move, they will be able to deduce your choice of second peek is weird, which give them extra informations.

Example of a 2 player start

Here is my personnal start for 2 players if the other player doesn't interfere with what I do and nothing special is going on: https://www.zupimages.net/up/22/07/v4ej.jpg . (it's a great one for effeciency, but far from optimal)

That start is done to first, have an okay start if you first four peeks are differents (path 100> 80V 46< 11^), that will let you have two pairs next to each other (or one triple) turn 3 all the time.

Here is the same document for 2players https://i.ibb.co/tDCSKwV/yokai5-2.jpg done to create two differents '+' for both players. Depending of where the first player center his '+' (c3 usually, sometimes d2), the second player will center his '+' in differents position (usually b1, sometimes c4, rarely b3).