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Writer's pictureBoard's Eye View

Karakum

Designed by Arif Nezih Savi, with art by Laimes Kudikis, Karakum is an easy-to-play set collection, tableau-building card game where you are building a caravan of camels. The game is published by Brain Games.


In this game, the 2-4 players are drafting coloured resource cards (each colour has a distinctive picture too so the game can be played by colour-blind players). The card drafting mechanic will be familiar to anyone who has played any of the countless versions of Ticket to Ride (Days of Wonder): you can draft any two cards on your turn from the draw pile or the face-up display but if you draft a face-up wild card (a multi-coloured card showing gold bars) that is the only card you can pick up to add to your hand.



There's no limit to players' hand sizes but, as an alternative to drafting resource cards, you can use your turn to spend resource cards from your hand to buy a camel from the display, paying the indicated number of cards of the colour that corresponds to that of the camel card. The wrinkle here is that the there's an extra cost for the camel card that's closest to the camel card draw pile and for all other camel cards in the display that share its colour.


When you buy a camel card you add it to your caravan but, after the first card, you can only place a card to the right of your caravan driver if it is the same number or colour as the previous card. Do that and it'll score you the number of points on the card at the end of the game (when the camel draw pile runs out). If you buy a camel card that you cannot immediately place in your caravan because it matches neither the colour nor number of the previous camel card, you have to place it to the left of your caravan driver. Cards in that position score only half their face value but you can move a card from there to the caravan as soon as a suitable matching position opens up.



Karakum is a light, small-box, family and children's game that plays quickly: you can expect plays to take no more than 15 minutes. There's not a lot of strategising or decision space; winning or losing is mostly dependent on the luck of the cards that come up in the display. There's no downside in taking camels you can't immediately add to your caravan, tho' you may just hesitate over buying camels that are subject to the extra cost. There's scope for upping the tactics by house ruling penalties (ie: negative points) for camels ending the game to the left of the caravan driver and/or requiring players to expend a turn to move a camel from the left of their driver to the caravan on the right. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found these house-ruled variants made the game more interesting for experienced gamers. However you play tho', Karakum makes for an entertaining filler.


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