Samarkand

EvEvanstar2,5

Since I liked Paris Connection, I figured I would give this game a try. Essentially on your turn you invest in one of the two stock tokens belonging to one of the trading companies. If you are invested in a company, you can place camels for those companies. Each player has the opportunity to grab endgame scoring cards, and those cards essentially ask for you to get one or two companies you have stock in to put a camel in a specific spot on the board marked with a particular goods icon. There are mini points for being the first to place into a goods icon spot, and for getting two trading companies to meet each other for the first time, but overall this game was dull, and had little to no meaningful decision points for the players. Quite a bit of the game was simply looking to see what was 2 away, and then putting camels down in the direction of the goods your cards directed you towards. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

ToTomstar4,6

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