User blog:Lokshor/Century, the spice route

Century the spice route is purely a management game with a small tip of deck building. Players embody spice merchants and must make the best deals possible to get fortune and fame!

The richest and most renowned

The goal of the game is to score victory points by grouping different spices. These spices will be used to buy points cards. These cards have a value of different points according to their difficulty of acquisition.

'''Spices, yes! but not all of the same value!'''

There are 4 spices that have different values, in the order from lowest to highest:
 * The turmeric (yellow)


 * saffron (red)
 * cardamom (green)
 * and cinnamon (brown)

Cards will go from one spice to one or more during the game.

At the beginning of the game, we have in hand the starting deck:
 * a card that can pick 2 yellow spices
 * and a card that allows you to upgrade 2 spices (this can be the same spice as you upgrade, a yellow can become a green)

Then during the game, we will be able to buy trading cards to enrich its possibilities of combos. There are 3 types of merchant cards: Attention, exchanges can be made as many times as you have resources, so if the card allows you to exchange 2 yellows for 2 greens, if you have 4 yellow yellows, you will get 4 greens if you wish.
 * Resource cards that allow you to pick one or more spices
 * upgrade cards that allow you to upgrade one resource to another
 * exchange cards that allow you to exchange spices for others

Simple and effective mechanics



The game round is simple, you must do one of these: The game stops when a player has managed to take 5 point cards (or 6 for 2 and 3 players), then, we count the points.
 * Take a merchant card (the first card is free, to take another card, it will be necessary to deposit a spice on the intermediate cards)
 * play a card from his hand (so either take resources, trade them, or upgrade them)
 * take back all the cards already played
 * claim a points card (and pay for it in spices)

Important points

Even if the rules are simple, there are still a few tips or no rules to remember:
 * your caravan cannot contain more than 10 spices at the end of your turn, so be careful when you trade so you can put everything
 * when you do spice trading, you can do it as many times as you have the requested spice
 * you can only do one action per turn
 * passing to regain all his cards in hand is very useful, it is useless to use all his deck
 * taking a merchant card that contains a number of resources can be interesting even if the action of the card itself does not interest you
 * paying one or more spices to take a newly discovered merchant card may be wise before someone else does
 * there are some silver and gold coins on the endpoints cards, it may be worth taking them even if they are low values, especially if it allows to finish the game (and to prevent others to score more points)

We love
 * the material: small bowls are present in the box to put the spices
 * the style of the graphics that put in the atmosphere caravans of merchants of yesteryear
 * game mechanics: quick to explain and understand, but which requires a bit of strategy
 * the duration of the parties that allows for multiple parties to take revenge

We deplore
 * A big box compared to the material (when we have a number of games, we like the little boxes)