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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Ystari Games | Yspahan

Yspahan

Price: £34.99

RRP - £39.99

This item usually ships in 1 to 3 days.

Please note: This item is NOT normally available in our Bricks & Mortar shop. If you would like to collect a copy from the shop please contact us in advance.

Board Game; 3-4 Players; Ages 12+ by Ystarti/Rio Grande 1598. Yspahan the fair becomes the capital of the Persian empire. Thus, being placed at the centre of the world, the city enjoys a period of cultural and economic blossoming. The cities and villages of the region intend to take advantage of this expansion. Caravans loaded with goods and jewels set out for the desert, bearing the promises of a radiant future... +++++++++++++++++++++ Counter Magazine Review +++++++++++++++++++++ 2-4 players, 60 minutes designed by Sebastian Pauchon reviewed by Ben Baldanza Started just a few years ago, Ystari hit the gaming scene with Ys, a well produced and good playing game that foreshadowed nice things from the small French company. Last year, Caylus was a runaway winner of many awards and overshadowed the clever Mykerinos. For Essen 2006, the company has released Yspahan, and while certainly it won\'t get the buzz of Caylus, it is a solid game with an ambitious multi-part scoring plan. The game is themed in the 1500s Persian Empire, and players take the role of merchants who control the souks, send goods off the caravan to be traded, and construct buildings. On first opening the box, some players will be put off by seeing a bag of dice, but no need to worry. The dice in the game are used in a new and good-working mechanism to determine actions to be taken each round. The game takes 21 turns, measured as three weeks with a week-ending scoring happening three times. In each turn, every player takes one action and then can choose to build one of six buildings. The game plays quickly as the choice of action to take gets narrower the further you are from the start player. You win Yspahan by scoring the most points, and points are awarded in four different ways. The first way is to control a souk, or set of shops, at the end of the week. The second is to send goods to the caravan and have them carried off, and this scoring is triggered at the end of the week but can also happen if the caravan gets full. Each player has a small board that shows six buildings. Each building constructed earns the player an advantage useable for the rest of the game, and starting with the third building each earns victory points as well. Lastly, the game uses cards that offer the players a variety of options, and some of those options include trading in coins or camels for victory points. Yspahan uses seven different boards. Four of these are the individual building boards mentioned above. The other three include the primary board that shows the city divided into four districts, each identified by a symbol and containing souks of various sizes. Dividing the districts is a path that shows defined entrances to each of the buildings along the street. A supervisor begins on this path at the center of the four districts and he can move through the game to check on souks and send goods off to the caravan. A smaller board shows the caravan, which consists of three levels of four camels each. The final board is the tower board, and this is where the dice are placed and from which the actions are generated. The tower board has six levels, with the lowest level for camels (one of the two currencies in the game), the highest for gold (the other currency), and each of the four in between corresponding to one of the four districts on the main board. The primary and unique mechanism in the game is based on rolling nine dice and placing them onto the tower board. After the dice are rolled, they are grouped into common rank sets. The highest rank set of the roll is placed on the gold area of the tower board. The remaining sets are placed from low to high starting at the bottom (the camels). The result of this is that gold is always available, camels probabilistically always available, and the district-matching areas of the tower are available with decreasing probability. For the smallest district to have dice allocated to its area on the tower board, a player must roll all six numbers from their nine-die roll. The start player uniquely can buy up to three additional dice for the role, and these dice will help only him. After the dice are rolled and allocated using this idea, each player in turn will select a set of dice and choose one of the actions available for that area of the tower board. Each area has a unique action available, and all six areas share two other possible actions. The two actions available to all areas are the ``move the supervisor\'\' action and the ``take a card\'\' action. The unique actions are straightforward: on the gold and camel areas, players take gold or camels as the unique action. On the four district areas, players are allowed to place their cubes onto buildings in the districts in order to claim a souk. Players choose only one of these three possibilities: the unique action, move the supervisor, or take a card. For the unique action and the move the supervisor action, the number of dice taken (not the pips!) determines how much of the action is completed. For example, if I take three dice from the camel area, I can take three camels from the stock. If I take two dice from one of the city district areas, I can place two cubes into that district. Taking gold and camels is useful as both currencies are needed to construct buildings and each has other uses as well. When placing cubes into a district, certain guidelines are followed. First, you cannot place into buildings of a specific souk if that souk has already been started by another player. Secondly, you cannot start a new souk in any one district until you complete any that you have not finished. This stops one player from claiming all the souks in one region and effectively shutting everyone else out. Souks are as small as one building and as large as six buildings. Players do not need to complete a souk on a single turn, but only completed souks score at the end of the week. Each souk has a specific victory point value assigned to it. As expected, souks in the districts most likely to get dice assigned to them score lower than souks in the harder to reach districts. At the end of the week, all the buildings in the city are cleared as each week starts anew. Cubes placed onto incomplete souks are wasted. If the unique action is not selected, players can move the supervisor. The supervisor marches along the path, and if he ends his movement in front of a souk building that has been claimed, the cube from the building is sent to the caravan unless that cube\'s owner pays a camel to stop it. The caravan is loaded in specific order, and the first four goods sent each earn the owner of the cube two VPs. The next four earn one VP each, and the final four do not earn VPs for placement on the caravan. At the end of each week, the caravan scores for all players who have cubes loaded. The value is equal to the total number of cubes on the caravan times the value of the highest row placed. Thus if I have two cubes on the lowest level, two on the second level, and one on the third level, I would score five times three, or 15 points. The caravan is not emptied between weeks, and thus cubes placed on the caravan can score multiple times for their owners. The caravan is emptied only when it is filled, and if this happens it scores before it is emptied. The supervisor moves the number of spaces equal to the number of dice from the row, but this amount can be modified up or down by paying gold at the rate of one per movement point. If the player does not choose the unique action or choose to move the supervisor, they can take a card. The cards are all helpful and create opportunities to do several things. Some provide camels or gold directly. Some let you place a cube directly onto the caravan or into the city. These cards can be a good way to get access to the harder to reach districts. Other cards let you trade in camels or gold for victory points, up to a limit. Two let you buy buildings from your personal card without using camels or gold; a building that costs three gold and three camels could be built with just the camels, or just the gold, when built with the support of one of these cards. Lastly, any card can be used to effectively ``add a die\'\' to the action taken. If I choose the gold action, for example, and that has three dice on it, I can discard any card to take four gold instead of the three that the dice alone would allow me to take. After a player takes the dice from the tower board and chooses their action, they have the ability to purchase any one of the six buildings on their personal cards. Most require camels and gold; only one is purchased with just two camels. For each building purchased, the player gains an ability that stays with them for the rest of the game. Two buildings relate to camels and gold. If you take camels or gold as your action, you get more if you own the corresponding building. One building lets you move the supervisor up to three spaces more or less for no additional cost. A fourth building lets you take a card every time someone sends your cube to the caravan. A fifth building adds two VPs to value of every souk you control at the end of the week, and a final building lets you add one more cube to a district on any turn that you choose to add cubes to a district as your action. If this sounds like a lot, that\'s right - there is a lot to think about in this game despite the fact that the action choice is simple and limited. The decision to control souks is one that has little conflict but for the supervisor bumping off your cubes. The key is to be sure that you can complete the souk by the end of the week, and that often means taking a lower number of dice from the tower board just to be able to place where you need to. Constructing the six individual buildings quickly gains very useful abilities and together they earn 25 victory points. The biggest variable is the caravan - in some games it drives the scoring, and in others it is not relevant. The supervisor can be used to knock someone else out of a souk, potentially depriving them of their week-end scoring or opening the souk up for someone else to claim. The supervisor can also be used to send your own cubes to the caravan if your goal is to get many cubes there and push them to the highest level. Sending another player\'s cubes to the caravan is a mixed punishment - they may end up scoring more for the cube there than if it stayed in the souks. The balanced scoring opportunities from the souks, caravan, buildings, and cards make any single strategy subject to failure. Instead, each player must balance these opportunities by switching to the caravan if it looks like it will pay off well, or collecting enough gold to make the ``gold card\'\' pay off in VPs, etc. For a game that plays in 60 minutes, Yspahan offers quite a bit with deceptively simple ideas.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Ystari Games | Yspahan

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