The Middle Eastern desert unfolds its historical mystique in Resafa, a medium-heavy Eurogame set in the 3rd century AD. Players step into the shoes of merchants tasked with navigating the challenges of trade, water management, and resource optimization in a bustling caravan hub where ancient merchants once haggled under the scorching sun beside fortified limestone walls. We were immediately drawn to how the game captures the essence of life in an ancient desert outpost, where every drop of water was precious, and every trade negotiation could mean the difference between prosperity and ruin.
Drawing inspiration from historical elements of the ancient city of Resafa, the game masterfully blends mechanics like hand management, network building, and multi-use cards, creating a deeply engaging and strategic experience. Published by Delicious Games, Resafa transports us to a time when this vital stop along the caravan routes served as a crossroads of civilization, its massive cisterns and sophisticated water management systems sustaining life in the harsh Syrian desert. The elegant design work of Vladimír Suchý shines through in how the game mechanisms mirror historical realities – from the careful management of water resources to the strategic positioning of workshops and gardens.
After dozens of plays, we’re still discovering new strategic depths in this fascinating recreation of merchant life in ancient Syria, where every decision feels weighted with historical significance.
First Impressions
The visual design of Resafa captures the desert’s stark beauty and the region’s architectural heritage – from the weathered sandstone archways to the remnants of Roman-era cisterns that once sustained life in this unforgiving landscape. The components: workshop tiles, camel figures, and the central board are detailed and functional, putting players into their roles as merchants who must carefully manage their hand of action cards while navigating the desert economy. Having eagerly followed the game’s development since its first announcement at Essen Spiel, we were excited to get our hands on the finished product finally.
The setup requires attention, as the interplay of workshop and canal placements with trading tiles ensures every decision has weight in this intricate dance of resource management and card play. Our gaming group, usually skeptical of historical themes being pasted onto mechanical frameworks, was pleasantly surprised by how naturally the game’s economic systems and card-driven actions flow from its setting, creating an experience where every coin spent and card played feels thematically appropriate.
Components
The first time we unboxed Resafa, the quality of the components immediately stood out – particularly the wonderfully tactile camel meeples that we couldn’t stop fidgeting with during our initial rules explanation. Here’s a breakdown of the components and how they contribute to the gameplay, sprinkled with our thoughts after hours of trading, building, and scheming in the desert.
The Main Board
The game board serves as your window into ancient Syria, cleverly designed with two faces – one for the intimate dance of 1-2 players, another for the bustling bazaar of 3-4 merchants. It’s where you’ll find everything from the water network grid to the special card tracks, all thoughtfully arranged like a well-planned desert city.
Player Boards
The game contains 4 player boards. Each player commands their own slice of Resafa through their player board, complete with a camel track that measures your trading capacity. Think of it as your personal ledger, where you’ll track your growing influence and manage your resources. It’s your command center, where every decision about warehouse management and canal construction begins.
Action Cards & Bonus Cards
Then comes the heart of the trade. Picture yourself holding six carefully crafted cards, each presenting two possible actions like a merchant weighing different opportunities. These multi-use cards are the beating heart of Resafa, with each set marked by Greek letters (alpha, beta, gamma, and delta). What makes these fascinating is how each set combines different colors with different actions, ensuring no two merchant strategies feel quite the same. Like a well-planned caravan route, these cards guide every decision you’ll make.
Bonus cards complement this decision-making process by offering quick boosts or discounts when plans go awry. Drawing a bonus card at the right moment is like finding a crumpled $20 in your pocket. Together, these cards create a dynamic rhythm, where every flip and draw shapes your strategy.
Special Cards
The special cards from the color tracks are your hard-earned rewards for advancing strategically. Each track presents players with decisions at every level – do you take the visible top card for an immediate bonus, or do you shuffle and pick from the face-down cards, risking a less optimal reward? These cards unlock powerful abilities, extra actions, or endgame scoring bonuses, and choosing the right track to prioritize can tip the scales in your favor. The feeling of unlocking these cards, especially when you don’t know all the options available keeps players engaged. In one memorable game, advancing on the yellow track early gave us a flexible card and opened up opportunities to chain actions in later rounds. Pro tip: Yellow cards with flexible colors can change the trajectory of your game entirely, believe us.
Building Blocks: Workshop & Garden Tiles
Workshops and gardens form the backbone of your resource economy. The 34 workshop tiles (from starting tiles to advanced Level II workshops) are mini-puzzles, with their diagonal placement mechanic forcing players to think carefully about spatial planning. Meanwhile, the 39 garden tiles (both small and large) connect workshops and amplify their potential, triggering bonuses and VP opportunities. Completing a garden square is like hitting the jackpot in slow motion, while workshop production ensures a steady flow of essential resources. The synergy between these components is the lifeblood of your merchant empire.
Canal Tiles & Water Cubes
The water management system is brought to life through cleverly designed canal tiles and blue wooden water cubes. The canal tiles come with various pathway configurations and some feature water tanks on their reverse side. Each tile clearly displays its cost in the upper-left corner, combining marble and coin requirements. The paths on the tiles create satisfying networks when connected, though it’s worth noting that only vertical connections are mandatory – horizontal ones can remain unconnected, adding an interesting strategic element.
The bright blue water cubes stand out beautifully against the desert-themed board and serve as clear indicators of water flow from their starting positions around the board’s edges. When a canal tile is placed next to a water cube, the cube moves onto the tile, creating a visual representation of water movement that will matter during Rain scoring phases. The quality of these components is excellent, making the physical act of building your water network both intuitive and enjoyable.
Trading Tiles
These represent the various goods available for trade in different cities. The illustrations clearly distinguish between different merchandise types, making it easy to spot opportunities across the board.
Merchant Tokens
Merchant tokens (41), rare yet powerful, elevate this dynamic by enabling advanced actions like constructing Level II workshops or securing prime canal placements. Their dual-purpose design (20 scarab and 21 square tokens) adds historical flair while providing crucial strategic options.
Wooden Components: Camels, Player Markers & Tracks
Including camels for marking your presence in cities, player markers for various tracks, and scoring discs. The camel pieces are particularly charming and add character to the game. While the markers are placed on the player board and on the color track.
While the tracks are placed at the score board.
Sack Cards
These cards are a gamble in the best way possible, granting randomized resources or converting goods for points. Drawing one feels like unwrapping a mystery gift—sometimes you get gold and socks. While not game-breaking, they provide a fun element of surprise and a way to stay competitive when other options dry up.
Resource Tiles
The resource tokens represent 22 stone, 20 marble and 36 Goods tiles (18 spice, 18 amphora). They’re sturdy and well-designed, making resource management feel tactile and satisfying. There also are 28 triple resource and good tiles (7 of each type). And to mention that there are coins, we mean coins are coins…
Setup: Building Your Desert Oasis
Setting up Resafa feels like laying the foundation for a bustling trade empire—it’s detailed but not overwhelming, and the game rewards you with a satisfying tableau once it’s ready.
Start by placing the main board in the center and flipping it to the side that matches your player count. It’s a functional and attractive board with space for everything you’ll need during the game, from the colorful tracks for special cards to the canal grid that will soon become a hotbed of strategic competition. The Rain track prominently sits on the side, reminding you of the impending rewards (or losses) tied to your water network.
Shuffle and distribute the trading tiles face-down across the cities on the map but leave the bottom one of each color face up. This process creates anticipation as you wonder which lucrative goods will surface. The tiles are easy to manage, though keeping them neat avoids early-game chaos. Near your player board set up the canal tiles and place the 9 water cubes on the water source spaces in the water network area (place 8 if there are less than 3 players).
Also place the canal bonus tiles with picking one of the cards for the layout to spice up the game. Having them within easy reach is key, as they’ll come into play frequently, and seeing those water cubes stacked neatly is oddly satisfying—until they start flowing through the canals you’ve built.
Next, arrange the workshop and garden tiles. Separate workshops into Level I and II stacks, but here’s the thing, you need to lay two workshop tiles face up on the slots and a face up workshop tile on top of the deck. Then you need to organize the garden tiles (large and small) for easy access. This part of the setup might feel like sorting puzzle pieces, but it pays off once the game begins. Seeing your options at a glance makes planning your first moves far easier.
Each player takes two workshop tiles and places them facing any direction, but every player needs to place them corner to corner as said above, so later on in the game you can add garden tiles above and beneath them.
Shuffle the special cards for each color track, revealing one Level 1 card on top and stacking the others face-down. This setup introduces mystery and sparks immediate strategy discussions as players weigh the first visible rewards.
Place the bonus cards next to the main board, sort them out, reveal and lay three cards of each color. And for the sack card decks, place them nearby, ready to be drawn for quick boosts or random surprises—these small decks might seem like an afterthought during setup, but they’ll become crucial lifelines during the game.
Each player receives their player board, a set of action cards, and starting resources: coins, stone, and camels. Laying out the camel tokens is always fun—they’re charming little pieces that feel like mascots for your budding empire. Action cards are shuffled, then each player takes three random action cards from the deck, then place the deck anywhere, this is fully explained in the mechanics section, the workshops and resources are neatly arranged to avoid mid-game clutter.
Finally, set the round marker on the Rain track to indicate the game’s start. Remember that Rain scoring occurs at the end of every even round, adding a rhythm to the game that influences when to focus on building your water network. This small touch of timing adds depth to the setup, ensuring that your strategy begins the moment the game does. You’re now ready to start your journey into the desert, with every decision feeling like a step toward building your empire. The image below shows the full setup of the board game:
Gameplay Mechanics
Gameplay Mechanics At the core of Resafa is the ingenious use of action cards. These cards offer two actions per card—primary and secondary—tied to a color-coded system. The flexibility of these multi-use cards forces players to weigh every move carefully.
The Action Card System
Each player begins with six action cards that form their strategy. We’ve found that mastering the timing of these cards is crucial – for each round, you’ll play one card from your hand of three, choose a main action, and trigger a secondary color action, making each action precious. The dual nature of these cards has led to some delightfully agonizing decisions in our games. Do you play that production card for its primary action, or do you need that blue color bonus to advance on the special card track?
Workshop and garden tiles
Workshop construction forms the foundation of your desert mercantile empire, with each workshop contributing to your resource production and point generation, much like the ancient artisans’s quarters that once lined Resafa’s bustling streets. The diagonal placement rule “corner-to-corner” adds a spatial puzzle to the game, requiring you to think ahead about garden connections and optimal resource generation. In one session, we created a chain of workshops producing resources in perfect harmony (our slice of a 3rd-century bazaar), only to realize we neglected the gardens, which cost us key bonuses.
These gardens, historically vital oases that provided respite from the desert heat, are the heart of your workshop synergy. Placing garden tiles between workshops triggers resource bonuses and eventual victory points when you complete garden squares, mirroring how actual desert settlements relied on careful cultivation to thrive. The decision to build small, cost-effective gardens or invest in larger, high-reward tiles adds another layer of strategy. A perfectly timed garden placement triggered a cascade of bonuses in one memorable game, turning an average round into a significant victory point haul. At this moment, they made us feel like master landscapers of antiquity.
Water Canals and Canal Bonus Tiles
The canal system in Resafa is a standout feature that ties everything together. Building canals secures immediate bonuses and plays into the endgame strategy, where water management can significantly impact scoring. To build a water tank, players must complete two garden squares and have at least one trading base in the connected area, adding a layer of challenge and planning. Players must balance short-term gains, like acquiring canal bonus tiles, against the long-term goal of maintaining water flow across the network—much like the ingenious water management systems that allowed ancient desert cities to flourish despite the harsh climate. But keep in mind that to acquare a canal bonus tie you need to have a canal over it, but you must either choose to take the points of placing the canal or geting the canal bonus tile.
During one session, our group witnessed fierce competition over canal placement near a high-value bonus tile. Anticipating this, we maneuvered our camel tokens to a strategic city, leveraging trading profits to fund consecutive canal constructions. The resulting network boosted our mid-game score and positioned us strongly for the final Rain scoring.
Trading and Economic Strategy
Like the merchants of old who traversed the sun-scorched trading routes of Syria, Resafa’s trading system elegantly captures the essence of ancient commerce through a clever mix of resource management and tactical timing.
Your trading operations revolve around a camel caravan that can carry three goods (upgradeable to four) of the same type. Moving between cities costs one coin per road segment, making efficient route planning essential. Each city displays trading tiles with two rates – blue and red – that determine buying and selling prices. These tiles flip after use, changing market conditions and creating a dynamic economy that keeps players on their toes. In one memorable game, we executed what we dubbed the “Spice Road Special” – buying spices cheaply in Resafa and selling them in Gerasa for 5 victory points each plus bonus coins, perfectly capturing the thrill of successful desert trading.
A key strategic element is establishing trading bases in cities where you conduct business. For one stone and one coin, you can place a marker to gain either a square or scarab merchant token – crucial components for unlocking higher-level workshops and determining end-game scoring multipliers. The system also includes bonus rewards for certain trades, offering extra victory points, coins, or special cards that can significantly impact your strategy.
Your player board includes warehouse space for storing goods until market conditions are favorable, but timing these sales requires careful consideration. We have constantly weighed immediate smaller profits against potentially larger future payoffs. The interaction between trading, warehouse management, and base establishment creates a satisfying economic puzzle that rewards both tactical opportunism and long-term planning.
The color actions
Just as ancient merchants had to master multiple trading routes, Resafa’s color action system offers three distinct paths to success through an elegant dual-action card mechanism. Each action card features a blue, yellow, or red stripe, and how you orient your card determines which color action you’ll get alongside your main action. When taking a color action, you face three compelling choices: claim a face-up bonus card of the matching color, advance your marker on that color’s special card track, or draw a sack card for immediate resources. The special card tracks are particularly intriguing – as you advance, you’ll encounter symbols that let you either take the visible top card (gaining 1 VP and 1 coin as a bonus) or search through the stack for any card you want (without the bonus).
Hand management adds another strategic layer, as you’re limited to five cards at turn’s end (excluding special cards), creating tough decisions about when to use bonus and sack cards. What makes this system truly shine is how it integrates with other game mechanics – blue track cards often enhance trading, yellow boosts workshop production, and red improves water management. After numerous plays, we’ve found that mastering these color actions is crucial for victory, whether you’re specializing in one track or diversifying across all three. The system creates a perfect balance of tactical flexibility and strategic depth that keeps drawing us back to explore new combinations, much like the ancient merchants who had to adapt their strategies to changing market conditions.
The Strategy Behind Resafa
What sets Resafa apart is its tight action economy – as unforgiving as the desert itself. With only 18 actions across six rounds, every move matters like water in a drought. This scarcity compels players to pivot strategies dynamically, especially as the availability of workshops, bonus cards, and trading tiles shifts beneath the scorching sun of competition. The color-coded action tracks further enrich this puzzle, offering powerful rewards for players who invest wisely, much like the ancient merchants who knew exactly when to deploy their resources for maximum gain.
For instance, advancing on the yellow track early in one game allowed us to upgrade a starting action card – a moment that felt like discovering a hidden oasis in our strategic wasteland. This flexibility proved invaluable, enabling us to adapt our approach when a competitor monopolized canal tiles, forcing us to carve out a different path to prosperity, just as real desert traders would redirect their caravans when traditional routes became untenable.
The variability in setup and the depth of mechanics make Resafa highly Amusing. Every game feels distinct, with new challenges emerging from the interaction of players’ strategies and the dynamic board state. Each session writes its own tale of commerce and survival, echoing the stories of countless merchants who once sought fortunes in this ancient crossroads of civilization, where the whispers of long-forgotten trade deals still seem to dance on the desert wind. Like those historical traders, we’ve learned that success in Resafa isn’t just about having the best strategy but knowing when to adapt it.
Solo Mode Insights – A Fair play?
Playing against the Resafabot introduces its own challenges. The bot mimics player competition by blocking tiles, stealing bonus cards, and progressing on tracks. Its unpredictability adds a layer of tactical thinking, making solo games as engaging as multiplayer sessions. Though we suspect ancient merchants would find it quite amusing that we’re simulating their life’s work while sitting in our comfortable chairs with air conditioning. One solo playthrough saw the Resafabot dominate the canal network early, forcing us to pivot to a garden-heavy strategy. Despite the setback, the game felt balanced and rewarding, even in defeat.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
- Interwoven Mechanics: The seamless integration of hand management, resource production, and network building keeps every aspect of gameplay interconnected.
- Special card progression: It forces meaningful choices – you can’t max out everything, and it hurts in the best way
- The strategy: Limited actions and dynamic board elements challenge players to optimize their turns.
- Replayability: Variability in setup and evolving strategies ensures each game feels fresh.
- The Theme: Historical elements enhance the game’s atmosphere without overcomplicating mechanics.
Weaknesses
- Complexity for New Players: While the game is rewarding, its layers of strategy can be overwhelming for first timers. So, we recommend you read our Board game Lexicon or try a less complex board game.
- Tight Action Economy: Some may find the limited actions per game too restrictive, particularly in larger groups.
- Trading base locations: Could use the better visual distinction between 3-4 player spots
None of these cons significantly impact the game’s excellence, but they’re the kind of small details you notice after multiple plays. They’re more quirks than flaws—like that one friend who’s great company despite their occasional odd habits.
Final Thoughts On Resafa
A Desert Masterpiece After dozens of plays across various player counts and experience levels, Resafa has firmly established itself as one of our gaming group’s favorite medium-heavy Eurogames of 2024. Vladimír Suchý, known for his intricate designs like Underwater Cities and Praga Caput Regni, brings his signature style of interconnected mechanisms to this desert trading simulation, but with a refinement that makes it his most accessible complex game to date. What sets Resafa apart is how naturally its mechanisms flow from its historical theme. Unlike some of Suchý’s previous designs, which could sometimes feel like mechanical puzzles with a theme layered on top, every action makes intuitive sense here. Of course, you’d need water to sustain your workshops; naturally, gardens would make your production more efficient.
The game shines at 3-4 players, where competition for prime canal positions and trading opportunities creates delicious tension. Our most memorable session involved Sarah’s masterful manipulation of the water network, creating what we now jokingly call the “Great Aqueduct of Resafa,” which scored her an impressive 45 points during the final rain phase.
The solo mode deserves special mention. It offers a surprisingly engaging experience that maintains the tension of the multiplayer game. The “Resafabot” AI provides genuine competition without feeling artificial, though it does require careful attention to upkeep.
In conclusion, Resafa represents Vladimír Suchý at his best – complex but not convoluted, strategic but not stifling. It’s earned its permanent place in our collection, and we suspect it will be hitting our table regularly for years to come. For anyone who enjoys thoughtful, historically themed Eurogames with meaningful decisions and multiple paths to victory, Resafa is an essential addition to their collection. Just be prepared to spend your first few games learning from your mistakes – those ancient merchants didn’t build their trading empires in a day, and neither will you!
