The Göktürk: Caravan

The road west is a decision you make forty timesYou lead a merchant House out of Ötüken, seat of the Göktürk khaganate, in theseventh century. Iron and felt go west. Silk, turquoise and Khotan jade comeback — if the caravan does.Every kilo you load is a kilo of something else you left behind. Gold dust isworth nine hundred a kilo and tallow is worth twelve, and the animals do notcare which one they are carrying. That single trade-off is the whole game, andit never stops being interesting, because the market at the far end has anopinion of its own.Two ways on, and you take oneAt every stage the road forks. A short leg through bandit country, or two daysmore along the river. Water you can carry, or water you have to find. What ison the button is what you get: the distance, the days, whose ground it is, andwhether you have walked it before.Two hundred encounters wait on those roads, and they are not riddles with rightanswers. A flooded ford, a Tang commissioner with a book, a shaman who wantsiron for his coat, a blind singer who knows four hundred lines of the Kagan'sancestry and will trade all of them for a place at the fire. Each answer costssomething different — days, silver, goods, or what the men think of you.Paying is quickest. The road remembers that you pay.When riders come over the ridge you can buy your way out, and it works. Itworks the second time too. By the third, word has gone round that this Housepays, and the men who come for you are not asking for a toll any more.That is the shape of the whole game: the cheap answer now is the expensive onelater, and you can see it coming if you are paying attention.The House outlives the masterYour caravan master has a name, a clan and a childhood — a smith's son packs aload better, a boy raised on the border can talk his way past a spear. He earnswhat he learns on the road, and he loses every bit of it the day he dies.The House does not. It keeps its name, its banner, its treasury, its people andits plots, and it keeps the roll of every master who ever went out for it andwhat became of him. A journey can end badly without the run ending with it.Nineteen rival Houses, and they are not waitingEvery city has Houses in it already, holding most of what is worth holding.They earn while you are away, take the free plots, buy each other out, and sendword offering to buy you out. Come home from a long road and the map haschanged without you.An evening in the caravanserai yardThree games, played the way they were actually played. Aşık oyunu —knock the knucklebones out of the scratched circle with a lead-weighted throw.Üç Taş and Dokuz Taş — three stones and nine, on lines drawn inthe dust, against somebody who is genuinely trying to beat you.Play for silver or for a share of the load. The yard shuts for days afterwards,and a master known at every circle on the road gets back in sooner.What is in it200 encounters, every one written for this road and this century50 trade goods, from Zandanījī brocade to bow sinew, priced by whateach city makes and lacks12 cities with living markets — glut one and the price stays down forweeksThree historical minigames with an opponent that searches rather thanbluffsA House that persists: base, staff, plots, banner, and a roll of thedeadTwelve languages, complete: interface and all two hundredencounters in English, German, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen,Uzbek, Hungarian, French, Japanese and Simplified ChineseMade to be played on the couchNative 1280×800, full controller navigation, remappable keys, text scaling from85% to 150%, and a colour-blind-safe palette — because telling a profit from aloss should not depend on telling green from red.Nothing here is inventedThe goods moved on this road. The cities are where they were. The games are thegames. The wolf on the banner, the stone men beside the track, the ovoo youleave silver on — all of it is the seventh century, and none of it is decoration.