Components

• 8x8 Playing board
• 16 Dragon Towers
• Two sets of octagonal 'sumo rings'
• Rulebook

A playing board, divided into 64 squares in eight different colors.

The playing board is double-sided, one side being as shown below, while the reverse side has Chinese characters marked on each square.

This has been done to assist those suffering from color blindness, and also for those players who just think it looks better with the Chinese characters added!

So you can choose whichever side of the board you like. The game is just the same, but the 'look' is different!

Sixteen octagonal 'dragon tower' playing pieces. Of these, eight towers have a gold dragonscale motif on the top, while the other eight have a black dragonscale motif on the top.

There are two sets of octagonal 'sumo rings', one gold set and one black set. Each set contains:

• 8 large-sized rings (worth 1 point)
• 6 medium-sized rings (worth 2 points)
• 2 small-sized rings (worth 4 points)

Setup

Place the board between the two players. The row nearest to each player is known as that player's 'home row'. If the board has been placed correctly, each player will have an orange square at the right-hand end of his/her home row (and a brown square at the left-hand end of his/her home row).

Note: The game works equally well with the board the other way around (with an orange square on the left and a brown square on the right)

The more experienced player takes the towers with the gold dragonscale motifs, while the other player takes those with the black dragonscale motifs.

In any match, the player who takes the gold dragon towers for the first round will continue to use the gold dragon towers for the entire match, while his/her opponent will retain the black dragon towers throughout the match.

Each player will now have one tower in each of the following colors: Brown, Green, Red, Yellow, Pink, Purple, Blue, Orange.

Both players now place all their dragon towers on their own 'home row'. For the initial round, each dragon tower is placed so that the color of the tower matches the color of the square it is placed on. So the brown tower is placed on the brown square, the green tower is placed on the green square etc., etc.

The start position for the initial round is shown below:

For subsequent rounds, the starting positions of the towers vary, and are determined by the relative positions of each player's towers at the end of the previous round. This will be dealt with later in the rules.