New Game Round-up: Working the Markets in Istanbul and 30 Carats, Small World Figures Made Big & From Comics to Games for Kill Shakespeare and 30 Days of Night

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 diamonds.

In Istanbul, you lead a group of one merchant and four assistants through 16 locations in the bazaar. At each such location, you can carry out a specific action. The challenge, though, is that to take an action, you must move your merchant and an assistant there, then leave the assistant behind (to handle all the details while you focus on larger matters). If you want to use that assistant again later, your merchant must return to that location to pick him up. Thus, you must plan ahead carefully to avoid being left with no assistants and thus unable to do anything...

In more detail, on a turn you move your merchant and his retinue of assistants one or two steps through the bazaar, either leave an assistant at that location or collect an assistant left earlier, then perform the action. If you meet other merchants or certain individuals at the location, you might be able to take a small extra action. Possible actions include:

• Paying to increase the your wheelbarrow capacity, which starts the game with a capacity of only two for each good.
• Filling your wheelbarrow with a specified good to its limit.
• Acquiring a special ability, and the earlier you come, the easier they are to collect.
• Buying diamonds or trading goods for diamonds.
• Selling special combinations of goods to make the money you need to do everything else.

When a merchant has collected five diamonds in his wheelbarrow, players complete that round, then the game ends. If this player is the only one who's reached this goal, he wins immediately; otherwise ties are broken by money in hand.

Players in 30 Carats start with exactly the same items — a colored screen to hide their goods, five gemstones of each color in play, and five gold nuggets — but they won't stay the same for long! After all, each player receives a secret valuation card, ranging from +30 to -30, and the gemstones matching the color of his screen will have this value at the end of the game. (Gold nuggets are always +10 points.) Do you need to sell or buy your initial holdings? And how do you find out the value of everything else?!

Each player also starts the game with three transaction cards. Each transaction lists a minimum offer that a seller must make on his turn, e.g., at least two gems of his own color or one gem of his color and two gems of a neighbor's color.

The game lasts three rounds, labeled morning, midday and night. In each round, each player will be the seller once. The player chooses one of his transaction cards, then places an offer onto the table that at least matches the minimum offer required. If the transaction is labeled "simultaneous", each other player must simultaneously reveal an offer of his own, which must include at least one stone/nugget and must not match the seller's offer; if the transaction is "successively", each opponent reveals his offer in clockwise order. After seeing all of the offers, the seller either trades goods with an opponent or pays 2-4 nuggets to the bank in order to drop his offer into the bank bag (along with his nuggets), then draw that many items from the bag. (The bank bag starts with the same items as each player.)

In games with at least four players, the seller can pay 2-4 gold nuggets to the bank in order to look at the secret valuation card held by any opponent.

Once each player has been seller three times, the game ends and everyone reveals their valuation cards. Players then tally their scores, and the player with the highest total wins, with gold nuggets in hand breaking ties.