Review of the game "Karakum".

Author of the article: Kristaps Auzāns

• Mechanics: Collecting sets
• Game difficulty: Easy
• Game duration: 30 min
• Number of players: 2-4
• Best number of players: 3-4

When I look at my collection, I see that I have heaps of serious and long-playing games, but there is often a lack of games that are easy and quick to learn, play in 30 minutes, but still make quite a lot of meaningful choices. After a long time, one such piece has joined my collection again - the game "Karakum" .

Subject matter

Does anyone remember the classic 1950s candy "Karakums"? No? Well, nothing. The game is not about this treat, for some reason the candy is named after an Asian desert. In Karakum, each player is a merchant trying to build the best caravan to cross the desert. Is the topic particularly noticeable - not quite! For small games, however, it's more a matter of austerity and encouraging imagination. And it is not lacking here. I really like the design of the camel silhouettes, which reminds me of many famous National Geographic pictures, like this one:

Components

Karakum is a card game in a compact box. I would have liked the cards to be the usual size and a bit thicker, but they are still good quality. Importantly, the iconography is well understood and embedded in the double, that is, players can read the required card both by color and symbol. This in turn gives more freedom to play with different shades of sunset colors in the design and preserves the ability to play for people with different color vision.

In addition, it should be noted that the piled-up caravans of cards on the table look great, attract the attention of others and give the feeling that you have done something important - even if you have not won.

Mechanics

I can divide the mechanics of "Karakum" into two parts - regular and catchy.

Usual : players do one of two things during their turn - either collect resources by choosing one rare resource or 2 common ones from a line of cards, or pack camels ( the rules say buy camels, but that seemed completely off-topic to me ), where again there are cards line and players give up a certain number of resources to pick up a camel to add to their caravan.

Catchy : here is all the salt in the game, or rather sand in the desert. As players add camels to the caravan, each subsequent camel must match the previous one in either color or value. It is interesting, because you always get 1-2 camels from the camel market, for which you are stressed that someone will buy them and all the savings are in the wind. This mechanic gives players a nice tension between when to spend precious resources to buy a camel and when to stockpile more resources, as you will often be short of one resource. The game allows you to use two identical resources like any other resource, but this is of course very inefficient. This is always a difficult and decisive decision.

Another catchy mechanic is camel prices, meaning that at the end of the game, camels are also worth victory points. But of the camels available, one color will always be more expensive than the others. It constantly changes when someone takes a camel, so you never want to load a camel more expensively, but with the limited camel resource, you have to because the game ends when the market is empty, and you can realistically miss out.

Overall, the mechanics are cool. I remember that we played the first games in a flash, but then we started to delve a little more and now we appreciate the tactical choices in the simple rules. It must be admitted that the game seemed more enjoyable with more players.

Multiplayer

The game is mechanically simple and quite enjoyable. Admittedly, this will not be a piece that we will play many times in a row in one evening, but I can see that I will return to Karakum from time to time with the usual feeling of playing - this is simple, but pleasant.

Rating

Overall, Karakum packs a good game into the little box, with simple but tactically meaningful choices, good austere design, a bit of tension between players, and a visually pleasing end-game feel when all players have completed their caravans. It's interesting how often camels appear in games - this is the fourth game in my collection where the main animal is a camel. The rating is a solid 7 out of 10.