The object of Silk Road is to earn the most money through careful (and clever) purchase and sale of goods.

Setup: The board is laid out and 3-5 action tiles (one less than the number of players) are randomly placed on each city. The eastern cities get orange action tiles which include lots of chances to buy goods and the western cities get purple action tiles which offer lots of opportunities to sell goods and to present them to the grand vizier.

Each player takes 3 random goods cubes which they hide behind their screen and a total of ten silver (as one silkroad gold and five silver).

Order of Play: Each round of play is divided into two parts: an auction, then a market phase.

The Auction: Starting with the player to the left of the first player, each player has an option to bid for the right to be "caravan leader". When the auction gets around to the first player he may either take the highest bidder's bid, or else pay them that same value for the right to be caravan leader.

The caravan leader gets three privileges: he gets to decide where the caravan goes he takes any pre-printed auction in the city they arrive in and he gets first choice of the rest of the auctions.

First up is the decision where the caravan goes. There are either one or two cities accessible from each city on the board. The new caravan leader chooses one of those based upon which actions he's interested in getting to use ... or what he wants to avoid.

The Market Phase: Now the caravan leader executes any pre-printed action on the board. (Five of the cities, most frequently are those that the player had to go to, feature these.) These are just variants of the normal actions: 2 thieves, 1 grand vizier, and 2 weak trades.

Then he takes one of the action tiles on the board and either discards it or executes it. Finally, he decides what player gets to go next.

Play will pass around the table with each player taking an action and deciding who goes next until all the action tiles have been used up, at which point there is a single player who has not taken any action. He will become the start player who gets to auction off the caravan leader position in the next round.

The various actions are:

›Buy: (East Only.) Purchase 1-4 cubes. The first one is 1 silver, the second 2, the third 3, and the fourth 4. Each tile is keyed to a specific color of cube.

›Sell: (West Only.) Sell 1-4 cubes. The first one is worth 4 silver, the second 3, the third 2, and the fourth 1. Each tile is keyed to a specific color of cube.

›Trade: Trade 1 or 2 cubes of a specific color for 2 or 4 cubes of colors designated on the tile. Alternative tiles allow the player to trade 2 or 4 cubes of any color for the same number of cubes of any color.

›Thief: Steal a random cube from another player.

›Grand Vizier: (West Only.) All players reveal cubes of a specific color. The players with the most get 5 silver each, the second most 3 each. The first five grand vizier tiles must each be used on a different color of cube. (There are six total.)

›Crook: Keep this tile to change the color of a goods type on a tile in a future transaction.

›Barterer: Keep this tile to take an extra action tile on a future turn. (This causes two people to be left out of actions, one who gets the opportunity to sell the caravan leader, and the other who gets ... nothing.)

Ending the Game: The game ends when the players reach Antioch, the end of the Silk Road. Players score 5 points per silk road gold, 1 per silver, and 1 per good they have. In addition whoever has the absolute most points in each color of goods gets 2 bonus points. Highest score wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Silk Road could probably be best defined as a logistical game. At heart it's about turning money into goods, then back into money, and hopefully earning a good profit in the meantime. It also has elements of auctions (involving a player auctioneer, and thus making it similar to numerous games in which a player benefits from what he sells) and resource management.

From what I've read Silk Road was originally a Ted Cheatham design, with Bruno Faidutti doing additional design and development. Nonetheless it includes one very Faidutti feature: the thief. I've lost track of the number of Bruno Faidutti games which have a thief, but it minimally includes Citadels, Fist of Dragonstones, and Dragon's Gold. The thief mechanism in this game is exactly the same as that in Dragon's Gold: you reach behind a player screen to filch a resource cube.

Tags: silkroad gold      silk road gold