How Bazaar

In the absence of several of the regulars, I (Martin) convened with Ian, Andy and Laura for a brace of new arrivals to BoardGameArena set in North Africa. 

Fist up was Caravan, which I'm half-way through a turn-based game of, enough to know that it has the GNN-approved combination of simple rules and plentiful interaction. Laura had even gone to the trouble of watching a video to prepare, but was a little concerned that it had taken that group 3 hours to play. Fortunately it was more like one for us. 

The main idea here is familiar from Railways of the World: you're trying to pick up coloured goods cubes from around the board and transport them to their matching destination. But the tricky part is that you have only five camels available to you and often you'll want to move a cube over a longer distance.

Peculiarly, once a camel has picked up a good, it is rendered motionless, while the cube itself can be transferred to any other camel in a connected chain. So you have to shuffle goods along your chain, periodically moving the further back camels to the front, and hopefully planning towards your next drop-off too.

So far, so peaceful, but it's also possible to spend an action robbing a cube from a camel you share a spot with. To moderate this, each player starts the game with just one 'permit to steal', which you have to pass on to your victim, giving them an extra opportunity to pinch a good in the future. It's quite amusing watching someone painstakingly transport paper or cloth across miles of desert only to step in at the last moment and complete the delivery for them.

In our game, Laura took the moral high road, gathering up 3 of the 4 permits but then insisting she was too busy delivering her lawfully-obtained salt, despite my plaintive exhortations to steal from the leader Andy. His swift pair of deliveries of high-value cloth proved decisive:

Andy - 51

Martin - 45

Laura - 42

Ian - 36

Next Laura suggested Marrakesh, a game I've seen around for years but somehow never actually played. The BGA implementation can't match the tactility of the physical game, with its carpet segments of real cloth, but the game is still a lot of fun - again in the 'few rules, many chances to be a dick' mode. 

In this one, our market trader friend Assam moves around the souk according to a dice-roll, stopping to buy and sell carpets. On your turn you get the chance to turn him through 90 degrees before rolling a die to see how far he goes. If he lands on an area of someone else's carpet, you have to pay the owner according to how big the connected section is. Then you get to lay a new piece of your own carpet, hopefully covering over some of the other players' sections and connecting up sections of your own.

There's certainly plenty of luck in the dice rolling, but always in a fun playing-the-odds kind of way, not an irritating one. Andy rode his luck better than anyone else and the final scores ended up looking rather similar to the first game:

Andy - 57

Martin - 39

Ian - 33

Laura - 31

At that point we called it a night, but I'd love to return to Africa for either of these games on future occasions.