Bohnanza, Samarkand
At game night, I got another opportunity to play Bohnanza, and it’s hard to imagine that this simple game about planting beans was designed by the same guy who created Agricola and Le Havre. I didn’t win, because the game requires me to be two things that I’m typically not; lucky and aggressively social. I just didn’t have the enthusiasm to make sure that I bartered off all the beans that I didn’t need, and really I didn’t feel up to trying.
I also played Samarkand, which is an interesting take on the concepts behind railroad games. It’s a game set in the mid-sixth century, in which you are a trading family just establishing itself in the Fertile Crescent, in which you marry into various trading families and expand outward to create relationships with other families, while trying to get ahold of some rare resources in the region. On your turn you either marry into the family by paying a dowry, or use the trading families resources to start a caravan into adjacent regions. You get points when you establish trade agreements, find rare minerals, and generally get rich. The game has a short fuse, with an end condition that can come pretty quickly if people try to rush it, and the majority of your points are going to come from mostly luck, as the best points come from having the right cards in your hand. I won mainly because I got a few cards that were focused on a specific area and nobody ended the game before I could set up the trade routes between the Chinese and the Huns. It was an interesting game though, and it’s good to see a game of this type that isn’t about trains.
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