Well as it turns out I recognise a few of those characters so I guess I haven't completely forgotten everything when I was actually trying to learn Mandarin (which I've been super slack on this year). Nice to know XD

I was confused from the top but perservered anyway, yep this is one of those games that would require a few playthroughs and even then I'm likely to just play it like I play chess (aka moving semi-randomly and frustrating the hell out of my opponent as they try to work out if I know what I'm doing or have no idea what I'm doing especially whe I merrily skip out of complicated traps and blunder headlong into blatantly obvious ones XD). Love your instructions with the little pieces of paper, it did help with understanding a bit :)