OUR REVIEW
Djinns and Scheherezade
Sultaniya
Palace building in the desert
Inspired by the World Cultural Heritage town of Sultaniya you try to build the most beautiful palace. You take one of the double-sided boards both sides show a palace owner, first building tiles and symbols for scoring at the end. For a first game you should choose the palace owners that are suggested in the rules Ali Baba, Anis, Dunyazad and Scheharazade, for instance. Some of those boards also give you sapphires at the start or points for building tiles or guards.
Depending on the number of players you take out some building tiles and stack the remaining ones sorted by color blue for the entry level doors to the desert; red for the next level the walls; green for the second floor the princely residences and then the roofs showing sky. You are also randomly assigned two secret Objectives tiles.
In your turn you can build or call a Djinn or pass. When you buy you choose one of the stack and turn over tiles up to a maximum of three on display in front of the stack. Here you can do some planning, the tiles are double-sided so that you know whats coming if you kept an eye on the palaces of other players, you can use a bit of tactic or choose as clever as possible for your own palace. Then you must take one available tile, either at the stack where you turned over tiles or one of those displayed at any other stack. You place your first ever tile next to one of the tiles included in the board, later staggered as regards to the lower row and the illustration of the tile must fit all adjacent tiles and continue; tiles can be used any side up.
Completely enclosed gaps and building beyond the palace limits is not allowed.
This building is the core element of the game, offering both fun in selecting and hoping for suitable tiles and frustration when someone snatches a badly needed tile or you cannot find anything suitable.
But for this, or rather against this you can make use of the Djinns. You can call one and pay him for his services with sapphires. A Djinn depending on his color can renew the display at any stack or you may relocate a tile within your palace or do two turns of revealing and building or you may look at a stack and select a tile from it. Correctly built tiles can give you sapphires immediately and you also take two sapphires when you pass your turn.
If someone has built his fifth roof, every other player has one final turn and then you score your palace for windows, tower, cupola or garden according to the symbols on your palace board as well as gates and minarets, majorities for guards and points on the roof tiles as well as secrets goals that you met.
If you want more competition you can try the version of playing with open Secret Objectives.
Sultaniya provided a dilemma for us is it a good game or not? In any case and definitely it is a marvelously beautiful game - the Djinn pieces especially had us raving - but even in the beauty there is a but, because the design of the tiles as regards to easily recognizable features for placement takes getting used to, at its best. If you do not choose one of the two given starting distribution of the characters but choose randomly it can happen and does fairly often that several players fight for one feature of the palace, maybe tower or window, while another one holds sole sway over the gardens, for instance, so that the game can be very imbalanced. The secret goals add yet another element of chance. But it is fun to call the Djinns for help and to figure out where a tile fits best so the final vote on Sultaniya is: A beautiful game, interesting and sometimes frustrating.
Dagmar de Cassan
Players: 2-4
Age: 8+
Time: 45+
Designer: Charles Chevallier
Artist: Xavier Colette
Price: ca. 30 Euro
Publisher: Bombyx/Asmodee 2014
Web: www.asmodee.de
Genre: Tile placement
Users: For families
Version: multi
Rules: de en fr
In-game text: no
Comments:
Very beautiful components
Support cards for Djinn powers and placement rules would be helpful
Game can be unbalanced due to character selection
Compares to:
Tile placement games with pattern continuation and meeting of secret goals
Other editions:
Currently none
My rating: 5
Dagmar de Cassan:
If you love beautiful games, you should get Sultaniya; likewise if you like a mix of planning and rivalling for palace feature or guards.
Chance (pink): 1
Tactic (turquoise): 2
Strategy (blue): 0
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 0
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 2
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0