Istanbul Big Box

Have you heard of Istanbul, the marvellous offering designed by Rüdiger Dorn? It spawned two excellent expansions – Mocha & Baksheesh, and Letters & Seals. Now, thanks to Pegasus Spiele, you can pick up (and deliver!) all three titles in one ‘Big Box’.

Istanbul is a gateway-plus strategy game, based in a bustling Turkish marketplace. Your aim is to collect gems quicker than your opponents. This bazaar gets a modular treatment every time, as you construct it out of sixteen tiles in a 4x4 grid. You and your four assistants travel around to adjacent tiles, trading fabrics, spices and fruits in you wheelbarrow for gems. (That’s an impressive swap!)

Move to a new location and perform the stated actions depicted there. But every time you move, you have to drop off an assistant along the way. Run out of assistants? You have to head back home. Or, you can double back on your route, picking up that earlier-dropped assistant back into your service. Can you figure out an efficient route around the stalls to pick up what you need? It’s a wonderful puzzle of a board game mechanism!

So what do you get in the Big Box version of Istanbul? The Mocha & Baksheesh module provides a new trading commodity: coffee! Trade this valuable bean across four new market tiles in different ways to earn gems. Meanwhile, secrets are the currency in Letters & Seals. Deliver messages between the market stalls is a neat way to earn money. But even more valuable still is selling those trade secrets for precious rubies…

In total, Istanbul: Big Box provides you with the variety to play with a larger bazaar, in a 5x5 grid. This is the perfect way to play with all your Istanbul variants in one big package.