On Saturday, Randy gave me the three games he’d ordered for me… The Spirits of Niagara expansion, Alhambra, and Yspahan.

I took Yspahan out of the wrapper once I got home, and fell in love. This is a cool game!

Basically, the game has 21 turns, divided into 3 weeks of 7 days each.

Each turn, you can gain gold, camels, draw a card, place goods in the shops in the street, or move the supervisor (who sends goods from the shops to the camel train). After doing that, you can use gold and camels to build a building, which give you special abilities for the rest of the game. (e.g. you build the stockyard, which gives you an extra camel whenever you get camels).

At the end of each week, you score according to whether your goods are in an entire set of shops, and to how many goods you have on the caravan train.

The supervisor is cool – you can disrupt your opponents by taking their goods from their shops to send to the caravan, but they get points from the caravan anyway. Or you can send your own goods there, but then you’re not getting points from the shops…

The game is for 3-4 players, and there’s also an official game for 2 players. It looks like it plays quickly. I would love to play this sometime soon…