Istanbul

There is unrest in Istanbul's great bazaar as merchants and their assistants rush into the narrow alleys to try to be more successful than their competitors. Everything has to be organized: the wheelbarrows must be filled with goods in the warehouses, and then quickly transported by the assistants to different destinations. What's your goal? Be the first merchant to collect a number of rubies.

In Istanbul, you lead a group of a merchant and four assistants through 16 locations in the bazaar. In each of these places, you can perform a specific action. The challenge, however, is that to take action, you need to move your merchant and an assistant, and then leave the assistant behind (to manage all the details while you focus on more important issues). If you want to use this assistant again later, your dealer must return to this location to pick it up. So you need to plan carefully in advance to avoid being left without assistants and therefore unable to do anything.

In more detail, during a tour, you move your merchant and his suite of assistants one or two steps through the bazaar, then either leave an assistant there or retrieve an assistant left earlier, to finally perform the action. If you meet other merchants or some people on site, you may be able to take a little extra action. Possible actions include:

• Pay to increase the capacity of your wheelbarrow, which starts the game with a storage capacity of only two for each property.
• Fill your wheelbarrow with a specified commodity up to its limit.
• Acquire a special ability, and the earlier you do it, the easier it is to acquire.
• Buy rubies or exchange goods for rubies.
• Sell specific combinations of goods to earn the money you will need to do everything else.

When a dealer has collected five rubies in his wheelbarrow, the players finish the round, and then the game ends. If this player is the only one to have achieved this goal, he wins immediately, otherwise the ties are broken by the money in hand.