Yokohama Trading Post Calculator

In Yokohama you look up at the board and see your President trapped on the wrong side of the canal. Your eyes dart from one possible Trading House to another and they all appears to be traps. You pull out a calculator which takes into account friction when moving around.

Now you know how many ships to count but what to do with them? Is it worth the yen to build a post in Customs? Or would you rather hold onto resources and try for the Port? It is not simply a question of having enough Power. There’s the question of whether the Board will let that Power actualy mean anything before somebody nabs the space.

How to Use the Yokohama Calculator

On paper it’s easy: Build things by getting four Power in an area. To grab that token first? Get five. In practice, however, it’s brutal.

Where does your Power come from? The calculator breaks it down. Is it coming from raw Assistants? Is it coming from the Station token or from a strategically placed Shop? One of those stay put, while the other returns to your hand once the action is done. That means leaving an area empty for rivals.

Do you really want to go all-in on Assistants? They will return to your hand after the action. Hold out for a four-Power sweep in the Laboratory? Or is that three-Power dip into Fishing worth the copper? Those are questions answered in the reference tables which break down how each area scales based off its power.

A Trading House is a cash cow. It’s also a declaration of your turf. Nowhere else can anyone put wood down once you’ve got this thing down. Does it sits on top of someone else’s? The calculator takes that into account. Once that wood piece goes down, no one else can build there.

It guesses at your passive income. It also guesses how many competing action you think will happen there. Here’s where lots of people screw up. They figure everyone will go to the Port because Orders are so sweet. But what happens when two people fill up the area? Maybe they don’t bother with it just to spare themselves the movement fee and penalty from fighting over it. On paper, putting something in a rarely traveled spot looks like a great deal for its build cost. In practice, nobody ever comes through the door.

Yokohama’s timing matter. Having the Yen, having the Power doesn’t mean squat if you’re the fourth player to move this round. Your President may be blocked by opposing moves, requiring you to cough up more cash or go home empty-handed.

You can also enter route conditions into the tool. This way you’ll know whether your proposed path is possible: it takes foreign agent jumps and canal crossings into account. It then spits out a tempo score that factors in uncertainty. No black-and-white answer here; just a percentage of readiness. Because the state of the board changes quickly from turn-to-turn, that margin is critical. Early in the game, with plenty of resources, a ten percent chance margin may work. But as you look at your third (or fourth) Trading House, each movement point and yen represent points towards endgame scoring.

Then there’s the cost of Retrieving Trading Houses from the Employment Agency. Each time you retrieve them, it gets more expensive. It begins at four Yen, then rises to five, six, and finally seven. That increase mean your initial posts will need to be high traffic anchors that pay off fast. Your subsequent posts could be more speculative. Maybe you want to block out a rival? Or score a bonus? Use the calculator to compare those costs against your remaining amount of cash, so you don’t go broke in pursuit of marginal gains.

It’s a balance between short term use and long term positioning. But Yokohama is also a read-the-board-faster-than-your-opponents kind of game. Building posts is only part of it. Predicting where the value will build is what it’s realy about. This could be at the Port for completing orders, Customs for import control, or the Church for Faith scores. Every place tells a story about how the rest of the table is playing. And the calculator doesn’t do that for you.

Instead, it takes the guesswork out of figuring out financial feasibility and Power thresholds. Once you clearly see the build gate and the net Yen swing, you stop sweating the numbers. Now you focus on the rivalry. Yokohama goes from being a stressful puzzle to one you can manage. It is a tool to verify your instincts, rather than replace them.