Wouter & Ymke 
A caravanserai is probably a decent place to start if you want to make some money. Merchants are everywhere, travellers are passing through with goods to trade, and there always seems to be someone looking for something. In Caravanserai, we’re stable boys trying to turn that constant flow of business into a small fortune. We start with very little. Buying goods, trading with travellers, completing orders and occasionally borrowing money can gradually improve our situation.
That description makes Caravanserai sound like a fairly straightforward trading game, and the individual actions really aren’t difficult to understand. The harder part is getting yourself to the right place with the right goods at the right time. We found ourselves making little routes around the courtyard, only to discover that somebody had completed the order we wanted or rotated the fountain just before we arrived. Apparently even in the board game world, business plans don’t always survive contact with other people.
Caravanserai is heading to Kickstarter soon.
👥 2-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 75 minutes
📝 Designers: Pierrot
🎨 Artwork: Zsolt Varga, Zoltán Tóth, Norbert Nagy, Balázs Gracza
🏢 Publisher: Everland Studio (preview copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
On your turn, you make two movements, and each movement can be followed by an optional action. Normally, you move between one and three spaces. When another figure occupies a space along your route, you jump over that space rather than counting it, although several players may stop on the same space. Once per turn, you can roll your die instead, with the result setting the maximum number of spaces you may move. It can get you farther than the usual three spaces. There’s no guarantee that it will.
Most actions involve the six different types of goods. Merchant stalls sell bronze, amber, silver, emerald, gold and diamond at fixed prices, with the more valuable goods costing more. Stock at each stall is limited, and a stall only refills after your action if you buy everything remaining there. Your personal storage is limited too. If you need to make room for something new, you may discard goods.
The caravan rest areas are where goods can be converted. Each caravan tile shows which goods the traveller wants and what you receive in return, with the new goods always being worth one dirham more than those you hand over. You may repeat that conversion several times in one action if you have the required goods. Afterwards, the tile rotates, and after the third use it is replaced. At the white pavilion you can exchange goods for other goods of equal value. The blue pavilion lets you sell goods for money.
Money is tracked on your personal board, and your purse can only hold so much. You can increase its capacity by spending bronze or amber during your turn. If you need more money before then, the two money changers provide loans. How much you can borrow depends on both your creditworthiness and the free spaces in your purse. You can’t simply repay that loan whenever you like. Debt is cleared when you complete an order, and completing orders also improves how much credit will be available to you later.
Major orders are displayed at the towers around the board and require you to hand in a specific combination of goods. Minor orders work differently. At the red gate, you draw two cards. If you can fulfil one of them, you must choose an order you can complete immediately. If neither is possible, you keep one for later. That stored order can eventually be completed without returning to the gate and without spending an action. Until it’s finished, you can’t complete another minor or major order.
When you complete an order, its income first pays off any debt. You can then use what remains to refill your purse, with anything beyond that becoming wealth points. Your creditworthiness increases as well. Completing a major order also gives you an ability card. The other players receive the goods shown at the bottom of the card you choose, and the fountain is then rotated one step clockwise. Ability cards can also be bought at the blue gate by paying the goods shown on them. Their effects range from changing how you move or trade to providing points at the end.
The fountain in the middle of the courtyard affects the value of orders depending on where its red and green arrows are pointing. It can also be rotated at the blue gate, so the value of an order may change before you reach it. The game ends when somebody reaches or passes 32 wealth points. Everyone else receives one final turn, after which remaining money and debt, end-game ability cards and sets of completed major orders are scored.
Artwork & Components
Caravanserai has quite a bit going on once it’s spread across the table. The board shows the courtyard from above, with merchant stalls, striped awnings, trees, travellers and stone buildings packed around it. Warm oranges and browns cover most of the courtyard. The stalls, cards and player pieces bring in much brighter colours. There’s quite a bit to look at, which seems appropriate for a place full of merchants and passing caravans.
The goods were the first components I started picking up during setup. They’re translucent plastic pieces in different colours and shapes rather than standard wooden cubes or cardboard tokens. The storage tray displays them like little pieces of merchandise behind the stalls. It’s completely unnecessary for playing the game and exactly the sort of unnecessary thing I like having on a table.
The player figures are sculpted characters in bright player colours, and the personal boards give you spaces for goods alongside the purse and credit tracks. Cards use decorative borders and large icons for most of the important information. There are quite a few symbols around once people start collecting abilities and orders. We rarely struggled to tell what goods were required.
Then there’s the fountain. It sits in the centre of the board as a proper three-dimensional piece and immediately draws your attention during setup. Together with the upright market display, it gives the board some height and makes the centre of the caravanserai look busier. The whole production is probably busier than it needs to be from a purely practical point of view. I’d still rather have this than six coloured cubes standing around a beige action track.
Our Experience
Our first game started with us paying much more attention to goods than to movement. We’d see an attractive order, work backwards through the required conversions and start collecting what we needed. That seemed perfectly sensible until we realised we’d built a nice chain of trades that required travelling across half the courtyard. Somebody else had taken a less profitable-looking route and completed an order before we’d even reached our second trader. We understood how movement worked. We hadn’t yet understood how expensive distance could be.
Goods started looking different at around the same time. An expensive gem initially felt more useful than a cheap piece of bronze or amber because, well, it was worth more. In practice, that diamond wasn’t doing us much good if none of the nearby trades wanted it. We gradually spent less time picking an order and forcing our way towards the required goods. Instead, we looked more at what was already easy to buy and convert, which sometimes led us to a completely different order. Limited storage made stubbornness particularly inconvenient. Carrying several valuable goods that didn’t work together mostly meant we had nowhere to put the cheap thing we suddenly needed.
Borrowing took us a little longer. Nobody was particularly keen to put debt on their board, so during our first games we kept trying to pay for everything with whatever was already sitting in the purse. It was safe. It was also sometimes painfully slow. Once we started borrowing more freely, some turns became much easier to put together.
Of course, there was also the occasion where somebody borrowed for an order, lost that order and was left with debt and a collection of goods that suddenly looked much less impressive. The money changers probably slept perfectly well that night.
Minor orders could make those awkward situations even worse. One of us kept an order that looked manageable and then spent far longer than expected finding the required combination. With other orders unavailable until it was completed, that little red card stayed beside the player board for turn after turn, receiving an increasingly familiar sigh whenever its owner looked at it. Orders elsewhere were disappearing, caravan trades were changing and the original plan had stopped making much sense. Nobody was particularly eager to repeat that one.
Later games involved far more looking across the table. We started checking which major orders somebody might be heading towards, what goods people were collecting and whether another player completing an order might actually help us. There were some odd little reversals in there. Somebody could take the order we wanted and rotate the fountain against us, only to hand us exactly the good we needed through their ability card. Other figures could shorten a journey simply by standing in the right place to jump over.
We still spent most of the game working on our own trading routes, only those routes became much less fixed. By then, abandoning a plan because something easier had appeared didn’t feel like giving up on it. Usually it just meant we had finally stopped trying to make the market cooperate.
Our Thoughts
For us, Caravanserai works because its economy keeps putting small inconveniences in the way. Movement is limited. Storage fills up quickly. The conversion you want may be somewhere inconvenient, and borrowed money eventually has to come out of an order. Put those restrictions together and there’s nearly always something in your plan that could be done with one fewer journey or one less awkward purchase.
This is also why we liked several of the abilities. Moving farther or exchanging goods somewhere else isn’t automatically useful. It becomes useful when it removes a trip you expected to make three or four times. Some abilities looked fairly modest when we first read them, then became much more attractive once we could see exactly which recurring problem they would get rid of.
Working out those savings can become quite mathematical. Sometimes you’re comparing two routes because one saves a single movement or leaves one extra dirham in your purse. We enjoy doing that up to a point. I can easily imagine a table where every player wants to calculate each conversion before touching their figure, and turns would become slow. Caravanserai’s rules aren’t especially difficult. Playing efficiently asks you to keep an eye on position, inventory, money, debt, orders, abilities and the fountain at the same time. That’s quite a bit of mental bookkeeping when the eventual difference might only be one action.
The randomness bothered me slightly more because those individual actions matter. The die is optional, so you’re choosing to take that risk. Sometimes the destination you need is simply too far away to reach normally, though, and rolling poorly can add another journey to something you thought you had already worked out. Losing an order to another player can have a similar knock-on effect if you’ve already bought several goods for it. None of our games came down to one unfortunate roll. I still wasn’t particularly happy when my carefully planned shortcut became the scenic route.
I like the later part of the game more. Early on, increasing your purse or taking an ability has enough time to pay for itself. As somebody approaches 32 points, those same improvements become harder to justify. You may be able to make your next few turns more efficient, except there might not be a next few turns. Money causes a similar little dilemma. You need it to continue trading, and whatever survives until scoring may contribute to your final total. Eventually we had to stop improving the business and actually make some money from it.
After several games, Caravanserai hasn’t turned into something completely different for us. The orders and caravan tiles change, players interfere with each other’s plans indirectly, and we spot shorter routes now that we would have completely missed in our first game. The reason for playing remains fairly consistent: buy and convert goods without wasting too much movement, then turn that work into orders before the opportunity disappears.
If trimming two movements from that process sounds like homework, another set of caravan tiles probably isn’t going to change your mind. For us, though, that process has been enjoyable. I’d mainly bring Caravanserai to a table where people like comparing trading routes, converting resources and changing direction when somebody reaches an order first.
Our later games weren’t better because we’d uncovered another layer of rules. We were simply better at using the market that was actually in front of us, including the opportunities created by other players. We still bought the wrong goods, took unnecessary detours and occasionally regretted visiting the money changers. Spotting a shorter route before anyone else did became surprisingly satisfying. And yes, eventually we even stopped treating every loan like the beginning of financial ruin.
Caravanserai is coming to Kickstarter with Everland Studio on 14 September. The campaign page is already live if you want to follow it before the launch.
📝 We received a copy of Caravanserai from Everland Studio.
