This Sid Sackson title had been touted as Bazaar 2. I thoroughly enjoy Bazaar, as does my wife, so I was anxious to give this one a go. In actuality, though, this one has little in common with Bazaar. The game has enough things different from Bazaar to make it interesting. Players must move around the board attempting to gather commodities in sufficient quantities in order to sell at the cities. The more of a commodity one has to sell, the greater the payout. Each additional commodity increases the profits exponentially, so it pays to hold off until you can get just that one more rug.

The board is the real key to this game. It forces players to move in certain directions, limiting one's choices. Each time a player enters a nomad camp, he must give one of his commodity cards to them as a gift before he is allowed to trade. A player can try to avoid nomad camps and increase his normal movement rate of one space by paying $5 and rolling a die, but then he must move the exact number of spaces rolled. This often results in one over-shooting a desired target. The way the board is configured, this means a very lengthy journey before he can return to the desired space.

Another balancing measure in the game is that players cannot hoard too many cards. Once the commodity deck expires (which occurs often), every player with over 12 commodity cards in their hands must discard down to 12. This hurt Ted several times during the game. In spite of being forced to discard cards several times, Ted still ran away with this game: Ted 520, Tim 395, Greg 210

In spite of my incredibly poor performance in the game (I wasn't waiting long enough before selling... the key is having LOTS of one commodity), I rather enjoyed it. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but still worthwhile.