The Göktürk: Caravan

The road west is a decision you make forty times

You lead a merchant House out of Ötüken, seat of the Göktürk khaganate, in the seventh century. Iron and felt go west. Silk, turquoise and Khotan jade come back — if the caravan does.

Every kilo you load is a kilo of something else you left behind. Gold dust is worth nine hundred a kilo and tallow is worth twelve, and the animals do not care which one they are carrying. That single trade-off is the whole game, and it never stops being interesting, because the market at the far end has an opinion of its own.

Two ways on, and you take one

At every stage the road forks. A short leg through bandit country, or two days more along the river. Water you can carry, or water you have to find. What is on the button is what you get: the distance, the days, whose ground it is, and whether you have walked it before.

Two hundred encounters wait on those roads, and they are not riddles with right answers. A flooded ford, a Tang commissioner with a book, a shaman who wants iron for his coat, a blind singer who knows four hundred lines of the Kagan's ancestry and will trade all of them for a place at the fire. Each answer costs something 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. It works the second time too. By the third, word has gone round that this House pays, 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 one later, and you can see it coming if you are paying attention.

The House outlives the master

Your caravan master has a name, a clan and a childhood — a smith's son packs a load better, a boy raised on the border can talk his way past a spear. He earns what 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 and its plots, and it keeps the roll of every master who ever went out for it and what became of him. A journey can end badly without the run ending with it.

Nineteen rival Houses, and they are not waiting

Every 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 send word offering to buy you out. Come home from a long road and the map has changed without you.

An evening in the caravanserai yard

Three 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 in the 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 it

200 encounters , every one written for this road and this century

50 trade goods , from Zandanījī brocade to bow sinew, priced by what each city makes and lacks

12 cities with living markets — glut one and the price stays down for weeks

Three historical minigames with an opponent that searches rather than bluffs

A House that persists : base, staff, plots, banner, and a roll of the dead

Twelve languages, complete : interface and all two hundred encounters in English, German, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbek, Hungarian, French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese

Made to be played on the couch

Native 1280×800, full controller navigation, remappable keys, text scaling from 85% to 150%, and a colour-blind-safe palette — because telling a profit from a loss should not depend on telling green from red.

Nothing here is invented

The goods moved on this road. The cities are where they were. The games are the games. The wolf on the banner, the stone men beside the track, the ovoo you leave silver on — all of it is the seventh century, and none of it is decoration.