Resafa – Building, Trading, and Preparing for the Drought

Merchants are pouring into Resafa, eager to set up shop, trade their goods, and make a name for themselves. But this isn’t just about business. With the brutal summer drought just around the corner, everyone needs to pitch in to prepare the town. Canals need to be dug, water tanks built, and resources managed wisely. If you don’t plan ahead, you might find yourself struggling to keep up while others thrive. Will you be the one who turns Resafa into a booming trade hub, or will the relentless heat leave your business high and dry?

👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 60-120 minutes
📝 Designers: Vladimír Suchý
🎨 Artwork: Michal Peichl

🏢 Publisher: Delicious Games (review copy provided)

Gameplay Overview

Resafa plays out over six rounds, and in each round, you take three turns. On your turn, you’ll play an action card and choose whether to use the top or bottom half. After every odd-numbered round, you’ll draw a new card to refill your hand to three. During even rounds, you’ll play the remaining cards in your hand, which leads to a scoring phase at the end. Then, you shuffle your cards and start the next round with a fresh hand.

Every time you play a card, you take two actions in any order you like. First, there’s the color action, which helps you progress on a track or lets you grab a bonus card of that color. Moving forward on these tracks can get you special cards with powerful extra actions or end-game scoring conditions. Bonus cards give you extra actions or rare resources, while sack cards offer an immediate resource or trade bonus when played.

The second action is the main action on your card, and this is where things get interesting. You can construct workshops and start producing goods, build gardens between them to trigger connection bonuses, or dig canals so that water can flow when the rain scoring phase arrives. Traveling with your caravan lets you sell goods and resources for coins and points, and if you build trading posts along the way, you’ll collect merchant tokens. These tokens play a big role in scoring at the end of the game, influencing how many points you get for your workshops, gardens, and canals. There’s also the provision action, which works like an extra color action to help you advance on tracks.

At the end of each odd round, you flip over your played cards, pass the first player marker, and refresh the colored bonus cards. At the end of the even rounds, you gather your cards and shuffle them to set up your new draw pile. That’s also when the rain scoring happens. If you’ve built canals, you’ll earn points, and you’ll get even more if activated water cubes successfully flow through them.

After the sixth round, there’s one final rain scoring, followed by the big end-game scoring. The merchant tokens you’ve collected determine how valuable your canals, workshops, and gardens are. On top of that, you’ll score points from special cards, particularly the pink ones, which come with their own unique scoring conditions. When all is said and done, the player with the most points wins.

Game Info

Designed by Vladimír Suchý and published by Delicious Games, Resafa fits right in with their lineup of deep, strategic Eurogames. If you’ve played Underwater Cities, Praga Caput Regni, or Evacuation, you’ll recognize the familiar mix of tight decision-making and long-term planning. It launched at Spiel Essen 2024 and plays with one to four players, best suited for those aged 14 and up. A full session takes around 90 to 120 minutes, which, in my experience, means two hours if everyone knows what they’re doing and a little longer if it’s your first few games.

Components and Production – Functional and Solid

Before getting into the gameplay, let’s talk about the first thing everyone notices when opening the box: the components.

As expected for a game of this weight, there’s a lot in here. The main board is large, filled with trade routes, water networks, and locations for trading. Each player gets their own board, which serves as a reference with a quick player aid and space to manage their merchant tokens. There’s a healthy stack of different cards, including special cards, bonus cards, and sack cards, as well as a personal deck of starting action cards for each player. Trading tiles are placed on the board at the start of the game, so the trade landscape changes from game to game. There are also cardboard workshop and garden tiles, canal tiles, and a camel meeple that literally carries your goods across the board, which I think is a fun touch.

On top of that, you’ve got the usual assortment of tokens for coins, resources, canals, and merchants. Everything feels sturdy and well-made. The component quality isn’t anything groundbreaking, but it’s exactly what you’d expect from Delicious Games: solid, clear, and built to last. The iconography is easy to read, and the colors on the cards are distinct enough to avoid confusion, which is always a relief in games with a lot of different elements.

The artwork by Michal Peichl leans more towards function than flair. It’s not trying to be flashy, but it gets the job done and keeps everything readable. Personally, I prefer this approach in heavier games, since it makes it easier to focus on strategy without getting distracted by overly busy visuals.

Everything comes in plastic baggies, which work fine, but if you plan to play regularly, an insert or organizer might be worth looking into. Setup takes a bit of time, so anything that speeds up the process is a win in my book. If you don’t feel like organizing it yourself, I wouldn’t be surprised if third-party insert makers come up with a storage solution soon.

Rules and Gameplay – Decisions, Decisions…

Delicious Games has a reputation for making rulebooks that are clear and well-structured, and Resafa sticks to that standard. The game isn’t overly complicated, but it is layered, and it takes around 30 to 40 minutes to explain everything the first time. Once you get going, though, the mechanics click into place.

Resafa is all about managing your hand of action cards, contributing to the canal network, and navigating the ever-changing trade market. On your turn, you play a card and have to choose between two actions. And here’s where it gets tricky. Picking one means giving up the other. Every action shows up on multiple cards, but you still have to carefully balance what you play and when.

Beyond that, the color of your cards matters. Each one corresponds to a track that you can advance on, unlocking special cards and bonuses along the way. But there’s a catch. You can only fully progress on two of the tracks, and only one can go beyond the second checkpoint. Since these tracks give out special cards that help shape your strategy, your card choices have a direct impact on how you develop throughout the game. It forces you to make some tough calls. Do you push forward on a track to secure a key special card, or do you hold back and focus on something else? There’s no easy answer.

While you’re mostly focused on your own board, there’s plenty of indirect player interaction, especially when it comes to the canals. Water is a major scoring factor, and ideally, you want it flowing through your canals when the rain scoring phase hits. But other players can mess with that. If someone builds a canal in just the right spot, they can redirect the water and completely ruin your plans. No hard feelings… unless it happens twice in a row. Then we might have a problem.

Trading is another way players can shake things up for each other. As you travel between towns, you’ll be buying and selling goods, but those trade values shift based on player actions. A resource that was easy to sell a round ago might suddenly become much harder to get rid of, forcing you to adjust your plans on the fly.

One of the things I really like is that no two games play out the same way. The bonus and special cards show up in a different order each game, so scoring opportunities won’t always line up the same way. Even the placement of trade conditions shifts from one playthrough to the next. Sometimes a certain good will be easy to sell, while in another game, you might have to travel further to make a decent profit. It keeps things fresh and forces you to rethink your approach each time.

Final Thoughts – A Game That Rewards Planning

For me, Resafa delivers exactly what I want in a medium-heavy Euro. It’s packed with meaningful decisions, satisfying engine-building, and just enough interaction to keep things interesting without being overly aggressive. Every action matters, and there’s always that tension between what you want to do and what you can do.

What I really enjoy is that there’s no single winning strategy. Some games reward playing as efficiently as possible, while others push you to stay flexible. You might focus on trading in one game, canal-building in another, and find success in both. That keeps every game feeling fresh and stops it from becoming repetitive.

That said, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. While the rulebook does a good job of explaining the mechanics, it takes time to wrap your head around everything. If you love a game that rewards careful planning and forces you to make tough choices, I think you’ll really enjoy it. But if you prefer something more relaxed, this one might feel like a bit of a brain burner.

What I appreciate is that it keeps things competitive without ruining friendships. You’ll feel the tension, but you won’t be flipping the table in frustration. You’re always aware of what your opponents are doing, and their choices will affect you, but it never feels outright confrontational. If you enjoy indirect competition with plenty of strategic depth, Resafa is definitely worth a look.

So, is Resafa for you? If you love planning ahead, weighing tough decisions, and seeing your strategy come together piece by piece, you’ll have a great time. If you enjoy second-guessing whether you should’ve played that one card two turns ago, trust me… you won’t be alone.

📝 We received a review copy from Delicious Games.