In the year 1598, the center of the world was the capital of the Persian empire, Yspahan. And because it was the center, people traveled to it bringing their wares to sell and try to make their fortunes. You are one of those traders – how well will you do?

Yspahan is a great game with an interesting dice mechanic. But before I get into that, I’ll set up the game for you. There is a nicely illustrated and very colorful game board showing different colored groups of buildings, and a pair of crossing roads. Basically, what you’re trying to do here is to make the most money The game takes place over a three-week time period; once around the players is one day. One way to earn money is to have a marker on every building in a given color group at the end of a week. And one way to get these buildings is with the dice.

The dice. There are a whole bunch of them, and each day they all get rolled. Then they get placed onto a track with six spaces. All the dice that came up as the lowest number (usually a “1”) get placed on the first space, which represents camels (There are also camel meeples in the game!) and the rest get placed along the track, sorted by value. The highest value gets placed on the last space though, which represents gold. Because not every dice roll will result in dice showing all six values, the higher up items aren’t as easy to obtain. These would be the different building locations in the city. So, after the dice are rolled and sorted, the players choose which thing they want. Typically more dice on a space means that will give you more stuff. (A player can also pay to have more dice rolled; these extra dice are yellow, and may only be used by the player who paid for them.) If there aren’t enough spaces filled for each player, or if the player chooses, they may draw a card rather than get an empty space.

There are other ways to score points, like moving the supervisor and bumping one of the markers up to the camel caravan track. Also there are special “powers” which can be purchased with combinations of gold and camels. These powers are helpful, like reducing the cost of things by paying only the gold instead of both gold and camels.

I really liked the dice mechanic in this game. I hadn’t seen anything like this in any other game. It adds some luck, because you never know what will come up, but not so much that it makes the game totally random. In fact, it gives a lot more decision making. Sometimes the rolls will make the choice seem so obvious, but other times there are several things that you will want to do and have to pick the best one. The games are also quick moving. There isn’t a lot of down time between turns, and there is a lot going on to keep your interest.

This is definitely a fun game to try. There is a free computer version available, which is also fun, but not the same as playing it with real people throwing real dice and making pyramids out of real camel meeples (cameeples?) while the other players throw real wooden blocks at them. Yspahan is for 2 – 4 players and is supposed to play in about an hour and fifteen minutes, but games I've played usually last about an hour or less.

Jim
(Originally posted by me here on GatheringGamers.com)

EDIT: Spelling.