Resafa

Hundreds of years ago Resafa was a city in the Middle East, but now the only trace are the ghostly ruins of a once-prosperous centre for trade and commerce – and this game.

Players take on the role of merchants buying and selling, but also master builders as they throw up buildings as part of their growing network – and canals to keep the city in water. It’s a complicated undertaking, but we’ll try to cover the bases here. The large shared board shows the region around Resafa with trade routes connecting various cities, and what can be bought and sold in each city. It also shows canal routes that the players may contribute towards the building of. In front of you is your own – rather smaller  – personal board that keeps track of how many goods you transport – you begin with ‘one camel’ but can add more – and off to one side are two ‘starting’ building tiles that are placed corner to corner. As you play the game you’ll add more buildings in this corner-to-corner pattern in order to produce more resources (gold, stone, points), and place gardens between them to trigger additional bonus resources.

The core of the game is simple: each player has six cards and in each of the game’s six rounds you’ll play precisely three of them. Each card has two possible actions on it, depending on which way up it’s played, and the actions are build a building, build a garden, build a canal, produce resources from your buildings, or trade. Almost everything you build has a cost: buildings demand gold and stone, canals gold and marble. When you trade you either pay gold to take whatever resource the city sells: for example amphora or spices, or sell said resources into a city for gold – usually at better prices. Trading also allows you to build (at a cost) a trading house in the city, which again gives you bonuses.

Every card also gives you a bonus ‘colour’ action: yellow, white, blue or pink. You can take the colour action before or after the main action, and they can be used in one of three ways: to take a bonus card for some kind of one-off boost (to be cashed in now or later) or a ‘bag’ card which are each worth a point and will gift you something helpful (although they’re generally less rewarding than the colour cards) or finally you can boost your marker up the matching colour track, which each trigger bonus cards at certain junctures of the track. The yellow track will reward you by letting you improve your starting cards, discarding one of then for an upgraded version. The white track gifts you cards help with trading, the blue with canal-building, and the pink cards with ways to score bonus points at the end of the game.

Players score in various ways both during and at the end of the game. Your small player board may slowly fill with bonus tiles and during play and these will make buildings/gardens/canals worth points. Special cards you’ve gathered during the game are worth points, and the pink cards can be extremely valuable. Everyone will also score for their contributions to the canals and any leftover resources. The player with the most points is the winner.