Description
In Silk Road, players will be able to expand the scope of their Cities by building trade routes between them!
As an additional action during their Construction phase, before building a City players can pay 3 resources in order to build a trade route to or from a City they control. This trade route will be represented by a punchboard ring placed around your City. Each of these rings has two protruding branches, which will allow that City to be connected to two other Cities. This means each City can only be attached in two directions, creating a road-like chain! Of course, these rings will be fully illustrated to represent the trade routes they’re creating!
These trade routes give players a wealth of new options:
- When a City is connected to a trade route, its owner gains Victory Points equal to the number of other Cities that are part of that route.
- When a City is activated, the player receiving those resources can choose to take Knowledge of the colour of that City OR of any City connected to the same trade route.
- Cities connected to a trade route can be used as both their colour or the colour of any other City connected to the same trade route during the game when it comes to Mastery cards and other effects.
So what effect does this have on your game? Well, first of all, trade routes can be worth BIG points. The further into the game you get, the more Cities there are that can be potentially connected to trade routes, the more points you can generate.
However, your trade route doesn’t belong to just you – in the true spirit of commerce, anyone can connect to it and earn themselves points if they have the resources to spare!
Being able to choose from the Domains of all the other Cities connected to the route each time one is activated gives you a LOT of flexibility when it comes to generating resources. This is particularly interesting for multicolour strategies.
Let’s not forget that Cities can now count as the same Domain as any other City connected to the trade route too. When it comes to using Mastery cards like Irrigation, Relics or Mercenaries (all of which award you bonuses depending on how many Cities of a certain colour you control), this can give you a huge boost!
But that’s not all of course: you will also get a new array of Mastery cards that will work off the Trade route mechanic in order to help you generate new resources, Victory points, Influence and more!
