20 OCT

Review: Istanbul: The Dice Game rules the bazaar

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

When it comes to gaming, I am a man of simple pleasures. I need no boxes of sculpted minis, no hour-long setup, no manuals the size of novels. Let me chuck huge handfuls of dice, collect colorful goods, earn chunky gems, and I am content. Wrap the whole package in elegant artwork with a clear ruleset and a low price, and I am ready to play, anytime, anywhere.

That’s why I love Istanbul: The Dice Game, the (inevitable) dice-driven implementation of 2014’s award-winning board game, Istanbul. In that earlier big-box game, players moved their “merchants” around the “bazaar” to collect and trade goods, or to gamble in the tea shop, or to spring a relative from jail and send him on an errand for you. (Don’t ask.) The goal was to collect enough shiny acrylic rubies to retire rich.

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Post Author: martin

Martin is an enthusiastic programmer, a webdeveloper and a young entrepreneur. He is intereted into computers for a long time. In the age of 10 he has programmed his first website and since then he has been working on web technologies until now. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BriefNews.eu and PCHealthBoost.info Online Magazines. His colleagues appreciate him as a passionate workhorse, a fan of new technologies, an eternal optimist and a dreamer, but especially the soul of the team for whom he can do anything in the world.