Naturelich Games

The last game from my unplayed Essen 2005-lot was Timbuktu designed by Dirk Henn. The game has been published in 2005 by Queen Games. A previous edition was published by db spiele, Dirk Henn's own small private game publishing company.
Timbuktu requires players to maneuver their camel caravan safely through the desert. Each oasis on the way to the city Timbuktu is dangerous. Thieves will come and steal valuable commodities from your camels. The good news: players receive information as to where the thieves will hit. This allows them to maneuver their camels around the strike zones. Well, if it were that easy... ;)

Timbuktu is a deduction game. It's a brain-burner to a much greater extend than Clue or The Mystery of the Abbey. The typical lack of interaction in deduction games is even more apparent in Timbuktu. Maybe that's why I did not like it as much. The other players were quite fond of it, though.

Explaining the rules took a while - maybe it's just me; even after a few turns it felt like the game was not understood entirely. After a couple of turns the turn rhythm became increasingly fluent and I was half-way through enjoying the game. It is not a game I have fallen in love with upon the first game, but I will definitely want to give it another try (or two, or three...).

A small observation on Timbuktu's scoring mechanism. What really strikes me, that the game builds the scoring model during play. Whenever a resorce is taken away from any of the camels the price for that commodity increases. At the end of the game the total price for any one commodity left on your camels is given by the amount of units stolen during play. Below, you can find the pricing for our session.