![]() ![]() Only about 13 of its 64 pages deal with game play and strategy the rest is taken up with illustrations of the tiles, legends about emperors and the like, and 24 pages devoted to the rat, ox, tiger, and so on. Overall, the manual is long on production value and short on salience. Thanks, but I didn’t really need to know that “Beer Barrel Polka” became popular in the Year of the Rabbit and that bingo was developed in Italy in the Year of the Dragon. ![]() The layouts provided (some of which are extremely challenging) correspond to the 12 animals of the Chinese “zodiac” and the manual has a lengthy, elaborate section called “The Twelve Animals of Time,” replete with gratuitous factoids. You can choose from several tile layouts or easily create custom layouts. ![]() Many of the tiles also make sounds when you match them correctly flags say “thank you” in the appropriate language, for example. ![]() In most of the tile sets, when you click on certain pairs, tiny animations appear within the tiles: fish disappear with a splash, royal personages become crowned frogs, and UN flags disappear to reveal Planet Earth spinning in deep blue space. You get a wide assortment of tile types - the familiar mah-jonggset plus playing cards, flags, fantasy images (dungeon-and-dragon stuff), sports images, alphabet blocks, Japanese flower cards, and animals. Shanghai IPs improvements, though impressive, are largely cosmetic. Shanghai’s big advance came with version 2.0 a few years ago, when the tile layout was elegantly redesigned to add a 3-D effect that visually clarified which tiles were free. You can play it in Solitaire, Challenge, or Tournament mode. It’s one of those solid, classic, addictive games. There’s strategy, but not much complexity. You re- move matching pairs (some tiles are free, others are blocked) to clear the board. Just to recap, for the reader who has never encountered Shanghai: At game’s start, you see a top view of a pyramidal stack that contains 144 patterned tiles. The new ultra-deluxe version, Shanghai II: Dragon’s Eye, comes on four floppies and takes up a colossal 4MB - a far cry from the original, which required neither color nor sound to hold game players’ interest. ![]()
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