Tips yokai

General

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

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.

Peeking:

You usually want to (in order of value):

* if before your peek you already got a move planned, a tile which would make that move bad
* peek at tiles you can move
* peek at tiles not adjacent to any tiles you know
* peek at tiles far from the center
* if a single color hint is available, peek at tiles in the center to lock it there
* if before your second peek, you still got no tile to move, try to peek at a tile you could move which would make that tile close to the action
* if you fully optimise, and if you got a move to do before your first or second peek, you can peek at a bad tile (like a tile you can't move) to show to your teammate you already got a pair. In some cases, if you finally don't move your first pair, you will give extra infos

Moving:

You usually want to:

* group your pairs to make them be adjacent (for the others players to know you got a pair). You usually got two possibilities to move your pair, try to regroup them close to the action/the center/close to unknown tiles
* put low priority on moving tiles which are one or two aways: you got the upside to have the possibilities to 'fill the gap' with the others cards of that type
* if you fully optimise and got more than one pair, put more value on moving your latter pair: if your teammates paid close attention to what you peeked at, they can deduce things from your weird second peek (since you already got one pair)

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.

Drawing/Hinting:

Putting a hint block the tile which can't be moved anymore. Which mean you should lock a single card excentred with color rgb.

You only want to lock at tiles:

* where there is another tile nearby
* or the color of the card under the hint is known after your hint

Furthermore, locking a single card is not great. You want to do it only if:

* so the color is known
* the card is close to the center/the action
* maybe if your teammate got a timing to lock it or not

Example of a 2 player start (outdated, but still good):

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).