On the other table, I taught Nicky, Andrew and Guy Rudiger Dorn's Istanbul - which has just been nominated for this year's Kennerspiel des Jahres in Germany. In the game, you are moving a merchant and his assistants around the various locations to collect goods in order to trade these for rubies or sell them for cash which you can then spend on rubies. There are a few other ways to get rubies and these are the key as it is a race to grabbing five rubies to win the game.

This was an excellent game with the interesting mechanism of utilising assistants only when the merchant drops them off at a location or picks them up again. This made for an interesting route-building aspect so you weren't wasting turns going back for stranded assistants while ensuring the locations you visited were the right ones to further your ruby-collecting strategy. And it all played in about an hour so that kept things focussed. It was pretty close between Guy and me especially when Nicky blocked Guy from being able to grab his final ruby so he had to circle round for a couple more turns but I was just about one turn shy of being able to get my fifth when Guy managed to end the game and claim the win.