Istanbul Board Game First Impressions

Istanbul is a game I heard a lot of good things about but never got the opportunity to play.

I played it on Steam in 2021 then finally on the table in 2024!

There’s hustle and bustle at Istanbul’s grand bazaar as merchants and their assistants rush through the narrow alleys in their attempt to be more successful than their competitors. Everything must be well organized: wheelbarrows must be filled with goods at the warehouses, then swiftly transported by the assistants to various destinations. Your goal? Be the first merchant to collect a certain number of rubies.

Istanbul Gameplay

Players take turns moving up to 2 orthogonal spaces around a tile board each with a different ability. They mostly let you collect resources and earn money.

You have a stack of tokens called assistants, as you move you drop one off on the spaces you activate. Eventually, the stack will run out and you need to go back and gather them up to be able to move to new spaces.

On your way, you can trade, buy and earn the rubies that you need to win the game. The first player to 5 rubies wins

Theme

It’s very mechanical and not thematic but luckily the mechanisms are pretty good. They do match the name of the tile the action is on to be fair.

I get that you’re moving around the grand bazaar and that makes sense I guess. The shops/stalls you visit do their thematic thing too. But why movement is restricted and why you need to reel in your assistants to the level you do is weird.

Components & Artwork

I looked up ‘standard euro components’ in the dictionary and there was a picture of this game.

I looked up ‘standard euro artwork’ in the dictionary…

Istanbul Summary

Positives

The movement mechanism as well as the resource collection/trading makes a dull game interesting to play.

On mechanisms, those games where you either take an action or skip a turn to gather in your workers/actions disks is a mechanism I like. I’m talking Charterstone and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar among others including Century: A New World which is a game I often think about for this very mechanism.

The 16 individual stalls that make up the board can be placed in different variants to adjust the game or just placed randomly. I’m sure this is good for replayability but it could make the game slower if playing with a sub-optimal setup I guess.

Negatives

There is a lack of diversity in playing as there is one goal and only a set number of ways to achieve it. You’re doing the same things, just not necessarily in the same order.

Your goal is to collect rubies but it doesn’t say why.

The theme of shopping to trade and gain rubies doesn’t make much sense.

Summary

So this is a mid-weight Euro with a leaning more to the mechanical than thematic. To capture my attention you need to be interesting or fun and this game is neither.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s bad it just falls into the middle of a three-pronged Venn diagram of more interesting things to play. Everything it does well has games that do it just as well or better and come with other positives.

So a good game, but not great in my opinion.

Istanbul Digital Edition

Istanbul is a game I heard a lot of good things about but never got the opportunity to play. Well, thanks to Steam, I can play it in lockdown in 2021!

This is a playthrough of the digital version of Istanbul. It does a good job of guiding you through the game step by step.

This is a very good digital version of a board game with everything clear and working well except for minor issues in scrolling around the board. Highlighting the available movement is useful for turn planning as is being able to easily see your resources.

I prefer playing it physically to digitally.

Jesta ThaRogue