Business is thriving in the desert
🐫Resafa is the newest game from Vladimir Suchy, released at this year's #SPIEL24 . As with any Suchy game it immediately got our attention. ✌ ️ Let's take a closer look and see how it matches up against other games from him. 🕵️
The theme itself is quite bland - it is the year 300 AD in the Middle-East. 🏜️ Resafa is a desert outpost that is growing thanks to being a centerpoint of multiple caravan routes. Players are merchants 💰 trying to make a name for themselves.
The best feature of Resafa is its action selection. 👉I’ve seen it compared to Underwater Cities, but actually it reminds me more of Kutna Hora. Players have 6 cards, each one depicting 2 actions, and whenever you play a card you choose an action by rotating the card accordingly. 🧐 So with each chosen action you also give up on the alternative option, and you only get back your cards every 2 full rounds. What makes this even better are the colors on the cards - in addition to your action you also get to do a color action, going up on tracks or drafting helpful cards. 😉
The actions let you build Workshops 🏭 that provide additional rooms to activate when you use the Produce 🔨 action. You can also build Gardens 🌴 between your Workshops to get connected bonus resources - completed Gardens are important for a few things. There is also an action type that is the same as a color action. You can build Water Canals 💧 too to influence the flow of rainwater, which are essential for special scoring phases. Finally there is the Trading 🐪 action that is a bit of a pickup-and-deliver mini game, though it feels a bit restrictive and there are mainly just 2 resource types that you want to carry around.
Playing 6 rounds you cycle through your action cards 3 times then the game ends. ⌛
💬There are some good ideas in Resafa but also some unnecessarily fiddly rules. When you write down the mechanics it all sounds very nice, but we were ultimately left underwhelmed. 😞 Maybe because this year had so many great euros, or maybe because many of Suchy’s other games are so good...
Still, we’ll explore it a bit more and get back with some further impressions. 💪
