Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
From the rulebook:
“‛RESAFA’ takes place during the 3rd century AD in the area of today’s Middle East. Resafa now lies in ruins in modern-day Syria but at this time it was a fortified desert outpost which flourished as a stop along important caravan routes.
In the game, players represent merchants who are establishing their businesses in Resafa. They build workshops which produce goods, resources and camels. They also build gardens between their workshops which help generate more resources. They visit nearby trading centres to buy and sell goods that they transport using their camel caravans and they can also build trading bases in those locations. Resafa had no local sources of water so it depended heavily on large water tanks to collect the spring and winter rainwaters to make the area habitable. Players also build water tanks and canals to distribute that water where it is needed.”
Overview
In Resafa, players begin the game with a set of cards that they will use to perform actions on their turn or, when flipped 180 degrees, a different set of actions. In addition to the two action icons printed on each card, the tops and bottom edges of the cards have one of four possible colors assigned to them. When a player selects a card for its action, they are also selecting the card for its associated color-based action as well.
These actions allow the players to interact with the game in a number of ways: constructing workshops to gain access to the resources they produce, constructing gardens for one-time bonuses, engaging in trade, and building up the city’s water reserves. The game is played out over six rounds. In each round, players will be playing exactly three cards from their six card deck. Every two rounds, players reset their decks and start again after a brief scoring interlude. Time is short. Efficiency is key. Virtually everything results in the scoring of points, and the player with the most points at the end of the game wins.
Of course, this is a high-level overview of the game. If you’d like to learn more about how Resafa is actually played, then read on. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section to see what I think of the game.
Setup
Central to Resafa is the main game board, which is roughly divided into three sections, bordered by a score track. The top section, taking up most of the real estate, is the trade section. This section is divided into small squares (representing locations the players can visit) connected together by roads. On each of these squares, there is placed a trading tile. The players’ camel pawns begin the game at the centermost location, the titular outpost of Resafa. This is also where the Garden tile supply is located.
To the right of the trade area is the canal area. This area will be seeded with a number of Canal bonus tiles as well as some water cubes. Beneath this, running the entire length of the board, is the card row. This is divided into four different tracks which are seeded with cards of a specific color—yellow, white, blue, and pink. Each player will place one of their cubes onto the starting space of each track, and their scoring marker is placed onto the 0 space of the score track.
The deck of Sack cards is shuffled and kept close by. There will also be an array of Bonus cards. Each color of Bonus card receives its own row, and there will only ever be three Bonus cards turned face up from their respective decks at a time.
With the main board set up, each player receives their own player board, a couple of starting Garden tiles, the remainder of their cube supply, a set of Canal tiles in their color, and a couple of gold. One of their cubes is placed onto the ‘1’ of the Camel track running alongside the right side of their Player board. Each player also receives a deck of starting Action cards. Each deck, while similar in appearance, is uniquely different. Players familiar with the game can select their favorites, or they can just be distributed randomly.
Once this setup is complete, a starting player is chosen and you’re ready to begin playing Resafa.
Make Your Choice
Resafa is all about making the best of the hand that was dealt to you, in a very literal sense. As touched on earlier, each player begins the game with a svelte deck of six double-ended cards. One end of the card pictures an icon for one of the game’s actions as well as a band of color along the edge, and the other end of the card pictures an entirely different action and color band combination. In your card deck, each color band appears exactly 3 times, and each action appears only twice.
To better understand the way that your card deck works, consider the following. The game is played over 3 rounds, and each round is subdivided into two action phases. The action phases are further subdivided into 3 turns*. In the first action phase of the current round, you’ll be drawing 3 cards from your deck of 6 to start the phase. On each turn, you’ll play a card, do whatever the card lets you do, and then replenish your hand by drawing another card into it.
You do not begin the second action phase by reclaiming your used cards. Instead, in the second action phase, on your first turn, you’ll only have access to the 3 cards that were not used in the first action phase. This means that any card that you play is going to be played, at most, 3 times in a single game. So, you’re faced with tough decisions before you’ve even begun playing. Do you focus in and try to specialize in one or two aspects of the game, or do you take a more general approach and spread your efforts around?
*NOTE: this is not the terminology the game uses for rounds, phases, and turns. I’m using this terminology for the purposes of clarity.
Color Band Actions
There are five different actions in the game and three different color bands. When playing an Action card from hand, it is placed face up above your Player board with the action and color band combination you are choosing at the top. Using the color band is easy. You have the option to move up a space on the corresponding track, acquire a Bonus card of the corresponding color, or take a card off the top of the Sack card deck.
When reaching certain breakpoints on the color tracks, you will have the ability to acquire a new card to add to your arsenal. The type, and benefit, of the card depends on the color of the track. The yellow cards are better versions of your starting cards and will replace their corresponding cards. White cards can be discarded to perform additional actions. Blue cards may also provide additional actions, but some provide ongoing benefits as well. Pink cards are all about end-of-game scoring. With the exception of the yellow cards, any cards acquired from the tracks live on the table in front of you and do not count toward your hand limit.
You heard that right. You do have a hand limit. If you’ve ever got more than five cards in hand at the end of a turn, you’ve got to discard down to five. Bonus cards and Sack cards serve to exacerbate this hand size inflation. Bonus cards, as their name implies, provide you with some sort of immediate bonus when/if you choose to discard them. Sack cards do much the same. With Bonus cards, you know what you’re getting. With Sack cards, you don’t. Also, it’s worth noting that the Bonus card display doesn’t refresh until the end of an action phase. So, if you see something you want, you’d better get to it before someone else does.
Icon Actions
There are six icon actions to choose from: construct a workshop, produce resources and/or points, construct a garden, engage in trade, construct a canal, or gain provisions.
Workshops are buildings that produce resources and/or points when you use them. When you build a workshop, it is added to your play area diagonally adjacent to a previously built workshop. “Why the weird placement?” you might be asking yourself. That is because those in-between places are where you’ll be placing your gardens.
Gardens come in one of two sizes: small and large. There is enough room between each workshop for 3 small gardens or 1 large and 1 small. All workshops have small icons printed along their edges. Connect a garden to one of these and you’ll collect its associated bonus. Extend that garden, and you’ll collect the bonus again. There are bonuses associated with completing gardens aside from these, and the more gardens you’ve completed, the bigger the bonus for the next completed garden will be.
Workshops and gardens might even score you end-of-game points depending on how often, and how well, you engage in trade. Trading allows you to move your camel along the roads of the main board (paying 1 gold per movement) and stopping at various trading posts along the way. Each trading post has you either paying money for a specific resource, or selling a specific resource. If you’re one of the first to interact with a trading post, you can also pay to establish a trading base there, collecting one of two types of merchant tiles for your troubles.
Scarab merchants are worth points at the end of the game. The others are not, but they’re still useful. Merchants are placed onto your player board where they will eventually unlock the ability to buy Level 2 workshops as well as increase the end-of-game values of whichever feature you assign them to. For instance, assign them to gardens and your gardens will be worth points. The amount of points each garden will be worth depends on how many merchants you assign to them.
Merchants can also make the canal tiles you’ve constructed worth points at the end of the game. To construct a canal, simply pay the cost associated with building it and place it onto an empty space of the canal area and score points equal to whatever you covered up. If there’s a bonus printed on the covered space, collect the bonus. If this space is situated next to a water cube, the water cube moves onto it, an important consideration for the rain scoring which we’ll discuss later.
Lastly, the ‘gain provisions’ action functions exactly like a color band action: collect a Bonus card, move up a track, or collect a Sack card. The main difference is that the color band actions are associated with their specific colors. The ‘gain provisions’ action is any color you choose.
Scoring
At the end of each round, a rain scoring is performed. First, each player scores a single point for every Canal tile they’ve constructed. Then, starting with the canal tile on which a rain cube is sitting, that cube travels a path downward toward the bottom of the map. Each tile the cube interacts with along the way earns that tile’s owner a point (and bonus points if there are any printed on the tile). Once the rain cube reaches the bottom, it is removed from the game. Then, the next rain cube (if there is one) moves.
The interesting thing about rain cube movement is that the path a cube moves is controlled by the player who owns the tile on which the rain cube began. If the path illustrated on a Canal tile branches to the left or right, the person controlling the cube’s movement may choose to shift it into the indicated column. This might be done to divert the cube away from Canal tiles that would score their opponents points. Or, more likely, it could be used to divert the cube onto additional tiles owned by the controller in order to score themselves even more points.
After the third round and the final rain scoring, end-of-game scoring occurs. Players earn points for their scarab merchants, points for building types—workshops, gardens, canals—if any, points from pink cards, points printed at the bottoms of any cards collected from the tracks, points for constructed canals, and points for leftover goods.
Thoughts
Firstly, let me say this: in the past few years, Vladimir Suchý has started becoming a designer that I am obsessed with. What started as mild curiosity with Pulsar 2849 several years ago has only continued blossoming into something larger the more of his games that I have encountered. Woodcraft is amazing. Praga Caput Regni still stands as one of the most interesting games I have ever played. Underwater Cities is to die for. Evacuation, by all accounts, is a pretty stellar game. I recently acquired a copy, but haven’t played it yet, so I can’t personally attest to that, but I trust the source. Resafa is no exception. Vladimir Suchý continues to impress.
In Resafa, every single decision you make has long-lasting repercussions. Each action only appears in your deck of cards twice, and each color band appears exactly three times. That means, for any specific action, you’re only going to have a total default of six chances to perform it over the course of the game. And, for each color band action, you’re only ever going to have a total of nine chances. Selecting any one specific color band + action combination is denying you one of your limited opportunities to use the unselected color band + action combination on that same card. That’s a lot to consider.
For instance, each of the card tracks consists of exactly nine steps. That means, if you want to move to the end of a specific track (sans using bonus cards obtained elsewhere), every single time that color band appears in your hand, you’re going to have to use it for its track movement and that, by default, is also going to dictate which action you’ll be performing. While that may seem like it would narrow down the decision space, it actually has the opposite effect. Many of the color band + action combinations are not ideal. If you’re trying to build a lot of gardens, for instance, then you’re going to have to deal with different color bands in order to go down that path. If you’re going the garden route, then different color bands means you won’t be able to move to the end of the card track using the cards in your hand alone. So, you’re forced to adapt, reprioritize, and restrategize on the fly.
Like any good euro, there’s a lot to do and very little time to do it. Any given path is a viable path to victory. The question is: which do you choose to follow? Making those decisions can be daunting, and that is perhaps the game’s only weakness.
Aside from a single face up pink card at the beginning of the game, Resafa doesn’t include any kind of directives—no secret objectives, no public objectives, no goal cards. While I don’t like a game dictating my every move, I do like it when a game gives me a suggestion as to what I should be focusing my attention on. It helps cut down on the time lost due to overanalysis, a condition to which I am highly susceptible. Resafa’s lack of any goals leaves the game feeling very open and sandbox-y… a little too sandbox-y at times. However, there are worse problems to have.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Resafa. With its interesting decision spaces, it tickles my brain in just the right way. The teach is fairly quick, so it’s easy to jump in and start playing. Despite the openness, turns are snappy, so the game never overstays its welcome. In the oeuvre of Suchý games (the few that I mentioned earlier), I’d rank it just below Underwater Cities and just above Woodcraft, with Pulsar 2849 coming in a close fourth. It’s not my favorite Suchý game, but it’s right up there.
Resafa details
- Designer: Vladimír Suchý
- Artists: Michal Peichl
- Publishers: Arrakis Games, Delicious Games, Intrafin Games, Jumping Turtle Games, Rio Grande Games, Tesla Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 60 - 150 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Hand Management, Multi-Use Cards, Network and Route Building, Pick-up and Deliver, Tile Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.56207 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Resafa.
Add Comment