Wouter & Ymke 
Nestled between the mountains of northeastern Taiwan, Pingxi has a history shaped by tea, natural dyes, coal mining and railways. As coal mining expanded around the turn of the twentieth century, miners and merchants moved into the valley and settlements grew with them. The Pingxi Railway Line opened in 1921 to transport coal through the mountains, connecting places such as Pingxi, Shifen and Jingtong. Alongside all that industry were sky lanterns, once used according to local tradition to signal that it was safe to return home and later associated with wishes, blessings and hope.
Valley of Sky Lanterns puts us in the role of local leaders contributing to the development of the valley. Railways spread through the mountains, lanterns are launched into the night and resources such as coal, tea and dyeing yarn keep everything moving. The railway and lanterns come from quite different parts of Pingxi’s past, but both ended up becoming closely associated with the area.
Valley of Sky Lanterns is one of the games heading to Spiel ’26 this October, where Taiwan Boardgame Design will be showing it at stand 4J325.
👥 1-4 players, ages 12+
⌛ Playing time: 60-90 minutes
📝 Designer: Icerain Lin
🎨 Artwork: Mr.Marker
🏢 Publisher: Icerain Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Valley of Sky Lanterns lasts six rounds, with everyone taking two turns per round. A turn has three steps: you may complete a contract, then take a die from the central board and finally place that die on your player board. That gives everyone twelve main turns, though individual turns can contain several actions once you’ve developed some cards.
The central board holds dice in several colours. Taking one gives you the effect of the space it occupied, which might provide resources, money, cards, points or railway movement. The number on the die matters afterwards. Your six core slots require their values to remain equal or increase from left to right, so you need to consider both the action you’re taking and where that die can go.
Placing a die in a core slot can activate sky lantern cards developed above it. You can also pay the resource shown beside the slot to use its additional effect, with the cost increasing according to the number of dice currently occupying your core slots. Three compensation slots accept any value and give their printed rewards, but don’t activate lantern developments. Camphor can change a die by one before placement, and coal can be converted into indigo, tea or dyeing yarn.
Teapot cards can be used in three ways. As contracts, they provide their effect and are then discarded. They can instead become permanent sky lantern or railway developments. Lantern cards sit above your player board and trigger when suitable dice are placed beneath them, whereas railway cards go below the board and activate when your train reaches or passes their section of track. Project cards provide further benefits for developing cards in particular rows or completing a row.
Your train collects rewards as it moves along its track, including those from railway cards you’ve developed. Complete a circuit and you unlock an upgrade, replacing one of the actions on the shared board and revealing a new source of income on your own. That income is collected immediately and again during later income events.
Rounds 2, 4 and 6 provide rewards based on your lanterns and the current era card. Rounds 3 and 5 pay out your accumulated income and also clear the dice from player boards before play continues. After round six, lanterns are compared by colour for majority scoring, with further points coming from railway development and leftover resources. Two-player games use a separate influence system and different lantern scoring.
Artwork & Components
Valley of Sky Lanterns is quite dark on the table. Deep greens, blues and reddish browns run through most of the boards and cards, with the lanterns, coloured dice and resource markers standing out against them.
There’s also quite a bit happening visually. The central board has rows of dice and actions, player boards contain resource tracks and railway routes, and cards gradually extend above and below them. A developed player area can look rather intimidating from across the table. In use, the iconography is mostly clear and we didn’t spend much time looking things up after our first few rounds.
The wooden components are mostly functional, with a few nice touches. Resources are tracked with coloured cubes, while the trains are printed on wooden discs. The score and round markers are shaped like lanterns, and there are 18 chunky dice in red, green, blue and black, with a cloth bag to draw them from. Then there’s the first-player marker, a small black cat wearing a miner’s helmet. We had people absent-mindedly picking it up while deciding what to do, so it may have an unofficial secondary function as a thinking aid.
Our Experience
Our games went fairly smoothly once everyone understood the iconography. Contracts took more preparation than we’d expected, and we started keeping resources aside for them rather than completing one only when we happened to have everything. Sometimes that meant leaving a development we’d been planning until later. Income was another thing we wanted in place early, preferably before rounds three and five so we’d actually collect it more than once. Those rounds clear the dice from your board as well, giving us fairly obvious points to plan towards rather than trying to map out all six rounds at once.
Coal became our emergency resource, and camphor rescued more than a few dice that were one number away from being useful. Sometimes neither was worth spending and a die simply went into a compensation slot. The cards were similarly useful when we drew something we didn’t particularly want as a development because we could usually find another place for it. Camphor went from something we spent fairly casually to a resource somebody would inevitably say we should have kept.
There were some quite different scores around the table. In one game, a player finished first in all three lantern colours for 36 end-game points but scored nothing from railway development. We assumed the lanterns had settled it, yet the final scores were close because of points earned elsewhere. After that game we kept a closer eye on each other’s lanterns. It’s easy to spend most of your time looking at your own cards and discover rather late that someone opposite has apparently taken ownership of yellow lanterns.
Three players was our preferred count. Dice disappeared quickly enough that we couldn’t assume the one we wanted would survive until our next turn, without spending too long waiting to play again. At four, we sometimes spent quite a while watching other players work through their cards and train movements before our next turn.
We introduced the asymmetric player boards after learning the standard game, and I’d use them again. Their differences go beyond starting resources: one changes the available core slots, another changes what some slots cost, while another has a different railway route. We ended up prioritising different areas depending on the board in front of us without having to learn a separate set of rules.
Our Thoughts
A die can be exactly where you want it on the central board and completely wrong for your own. Sometimes we’d take an action we didn’t particularly need because the number fitted perfectly. On another turn, the reward was important enough that we’d accept making the remaining core slots harder to fill. Those later placements can become fairly restrictive once several numbers are already sitting on your board.
Other decisions start piling onto that choice. Moving your train immediately can collect several rewards, or you can develop another railway card first and get more from the movement later. Completing a circuit adds income and replaces one of the actions on the central board, so the available dice actions change during the game as well. We spent plenty of time looking at something useful and deciding that we weren’t quite ready to take it yet.
I like the twelve-turn limit. We usually reached round six with another card we wanted to develop, a railway circuit we weren’t going to finish or a contract that no longer fitted into the time remaining. Some plans simply had to go. An inefficient early turn can hurt because there isn’t a long game ahead in which to make up for it, and we had a few developments that looked rather optimistic once the final round arrived.
Once we were playing, Pingxi itself faded into the background more than I’d hoped. Reading about the area explains why coal, natural dyes, trains and sky lanterns all belong in the same box, and I like the way lantern cards sit above your board with the railway running underneath it. During play, though, we were mostly looking at die values, resources and card combinations. The era cards put everything into a historical timeline without making the different periods feel particularly different. I would have liked the passage through those eras to affect the game more than it does.
By the later rounds, there’s plenty to keep track of. You’re checking your dice sequence, developed cards, railway, resources and other players’ lanterns. Someone who wants to calculate every possible combination can make a four-player game drag. Interaction is mostly indirect as well. Other players take dice you wanted, compete for lantern colours and change shared action spaces, but nobody is regularly interfering with your engine. If we want something confrontational, this isn’t what we’d reach for.
Valley of Sky Lanterns suits us better when we want to spend an evening working on our own plans while keeping half an eye on what everyone else is doing. The asymmetric boards are the version we’d use now, partly because they stopped us falling back on exactly the same approach. In our later games we were still trying different development rows and talking afterwards about the railway circuit we should have completed two turns earlier. We’ve played enough to know the game now, but not enough to feel finished with it.
📝 We received a copy of Valley of Sky Lanterns from Icerain Games.
If you’re looking for more games to check out at Essen, you can find our other Spiel ’26 coverage here.
