Board Gaming - Century: Spice Road

Century: Spice Road

In this first of the Century line of games, you play the role of a spice trader, collecting the spices that you need to fulfil a current demand (victory point cards).

On your turn you can do one of 4 things:

• play a card from your hand - this allows you to either collect specific spices, or trade some for different ones.
• make a trade route - collect a card from the market place and add it to your hand
• fulfil a demand - the object of the game, spending the correct amount of spices to pick up a victory point card
• rest - pick up your spent cards to refill your hand.

As opposed to a lot of deck builders, your hand is your entire unused deck and new cards go directly into your hand for use in future turns. The only way to get back cards you've used is to take a turn doing nothing and just picking up the spent cards. It's an interesting design, and the decision of when to rest can be quite important. It's also important to remember what you have and having the ability to create the spices that you need, and converting them into the other ones that you can't produce.

^{Seems I only took a photo at the end showing my collected trades and the central market}

One of the limitations that you have is that your caravan can only hold 10 spices at a time, so you need to focus on one or two of the demand cards, and make sure you can see if anyone else is looking at the same demands as you. With the demands wanting a combination of 4 to 6 spices, and varying in points from about 6 and 20 points it becomes a decision of going for the quick and easy demands and trying to rush the end game (which starts when someone gets their 5th fulfilled demand), or should you play a longer game and focus on the bigger demands and you might only get 3 before the game ends.

In our game, we had one player with an interesting heavy production of the cheapest (yellow) spice, and converting them into other things. He always had a pretty full caravan and a fairly mobile trade ability to change which demand they were after. I had a hole in my chain which made it difficult for me to obtain red spices, which I realised too late to do anything about. I still did ok, but it did restrict which demands I could fill. The winner of our game (also the only one that had played it before) had quite an efficient engine for getting spices and trading them to what they needed, fulfilling a demand and working on the next one.

It was quite a fun game, which doesn't take too long to learn, or too long to play, and would be a good option if you enjoyed Splendor and are looking for something more. If you like deck builders, it's an interesting take on them that reminds me a bit of Concordia and TransAtlantic's hand use, but with more deck building than either of them.

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^{Upgoats made by the talented @ryivhnn}