Players: 3-6
Time: 60-90 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Silk Road comes with:

• 1 map
• 90 action tiles
• 75 goods tokens
• 45 coins
• 5 turn tokens
• 2 large pawns
• 1 cloth bag
• 6 player shields
• 1 rulesheet

Map: A two-panel map that shows the Silk Road, from Changan in the east to Antioch in the west. There are numerous cities in between, with arrows showing how you can travel between them. (The map is actually a schematic.) Each city has spaces for five action tiles, and some have a pre-printed action tile printed beside them.

Overall the map is simple, but evocative, with distinctive pencil drawings depicting each city. There are some minor usability issues regarding which set of boxes belongs to which city (because they're sometimes right, sometimes left, someetimes above, and somtimes below, and so you can't instinctively make it out with a glance), but if you clear unused cities behind you of their action tiles, I think it remains pretty clear.

Action Tiles: These ninety tiles, half of which are purple (for the west side of the board) and half of which are orange (for the east half of the board) each have icons depictings one of several actions that can be taken in the game (buy, sell, trade, etc). Overall the icons are easy to make out though for a few of the less common activities (crook and barter) you may need to look them up your first few games.

Wood Bits: Silk Road contains a ton of wood bits. The goods tiles are small cubes in five colors (white, blue, yellow, brown, red). The coins are discs in silver and gold. The turn tokens are orange discs, and the two pawns (one for the caravan and one for the leader) are both huge brown cylinders.

The wood is all high-quality.

Again, I had some minor usability issues here. There aren't really enough coins for a six-player game. (Each player starts with 5 silver, but there are only 25 total, so one player has to take a gold coin instead.) It's also a bit awkward having the two large tokens be identical brown cylinders: as a result players often try and grab the token off the board when they should instead be taking one from another player (and further, the huge cylinder on the board makes it harder to read the board if you're across the table). For both of these latter issues I suggest substituting a camel for the caravan token, either from Oasis, Through the Desert, or Marco Polo Expedition.

Cloth Bag: A black bag is included solely so that you can draw random goods markets at the start of the game. This is a nice addition.

Player Shields: A small player shield for each player to hide their good tokens. They're printed on sturdy cardboard and again feature the simple artwork from the map.

Rulebook: A one-page rulesheet which concisely explains the game. There are a few places where I would have liked some additional explanation (on the auctions and how much negotiation is permissible), but for those issues I think we came to entirely reasonable conclusions.

Overall the quality of the Silk Road components is quite good, and the pieces are attractive. I had some minor usability quibbles in a couple of different areas, but they're all pretty easily resolved. As such I've given the game an above average "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

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 includes 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 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 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, at the end of the Silk Road. Players score 5 points per 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.

The Game Design

Overall Silk Road is a tight resource management game that has plenty of interesting tactical decisions. In the auctions you have to balance when it's worth spending money to influence the direction of the caravan and/or take the pre-printed action. When taking actions you have to balance what will improve your position versus what other players might particularly want.

The game is a little dry, which isn't necessarily a complaint, but instead a pointer toward the audience that will best appreciate it. I'd call other fine logistical games like Power Grid and Santiago pretty dry too, but would nonetheless rate thm well.

I'm not convinced the game has a tremendous amount of depth, as often it'll be obvious what action you should take when it gets to your turn, but since the game plays pretty quickly in 60 minutes (and not the 90 minutes printed on the box, even for six players), that isn't a huge concern.

However I do have slight qualms about the method in which the actions get passed on, with each player deciding who gets to go next. In my first game this involved lots of negotiation and promises of future goodwill, which all felt awkward. In my second game we left action tiles in front of players who'd played them, and this let people make better informed decisions (so as not to constantly skip the same person, and so as not to give a player an option to take an action when he might be particularly benefitted). I kind of liked this second method and it's what I'll suggest in the future, though I do think this particular aspect of the game has some innate fragility in it.

Finally I'll comment that I played the game with two player numbers: 4 and 6. I liked the 4-player game better, though that was also the game where we laid out the action markers. The 6-player game was fine, but the passing felt even more chaotic with so many people, and you had no chance of remembering who did what.

I think that Silk Road is a solid logistical game that's quite a bit different from others on the market. It's on the lighter side of the genre. Overall I've let it eke in a "4" out of "5" for Substance: it's an above-average game.

Conclusion

Silk Road is a new logistical game of auctions and resource management by Ted Cheatham and Bruno Faidutti. It's on the light side, but it's nonetheless a fine logistical game, and a lot less chaotic than most of what Faidutti does, so take a look even if you're not usually a fan.

In consulting DriveThruRPG we've come up with a number of products which we think might be related, but some might be inaccurate because the name, Silk Road, is so short. Nonetheless, take a look, as purchasing through the RPGnet Store helps to support RPGnet.