New board game coming from designer behind Spiel des Jahres nominated Cascadia

Update:This article previously stated that the studio behind Cascadia was Crafty Games. This has since been corrected.

The creator behind Cascadia, Randy Flynn has announced its next board game as Tabriz.

Having created Cascadia last year – which was recently nominated for the Spiel des Jahres, the most prestigious award in the tabletop industry – Flynn's latest board game moves away from the USA and towards Persia.

Tabriz is an upcoming board game that has players becoming carpet merchants operating out of a Persian market. In the game, players will weave various types of carpets in order to fulfill commissions from customers, competing with their fellow carpet merchants to acquire the best customers and earn the most money. Players start the game fulfilling commissions from common folk, before rising through the ranks to fulfill orders for higher paying customers.

On a player’s turn, they use one of their three assistants to perform a variety of possible actions on the board. The worker-placement game sees players using their meeples to perform actions such as buying and trading for materials for their carpets – such as wool, camel hair, plant dye or carmine dye – with players rolling dice to determine how much of each material they get. Players will have to be careful to keep their assistants within their appropriate ranges to avoid losing out to an opponent.

The materials players need for their carpets are also limited, with the market changing every round. Players will need to plan ahead to ensure that they have the materials they need to complete their commissions by the end of the round, otherwise they’ll miss out on scoring prestige. Besides completing commissions, players can choose to gain new skills in order to tackle more complex commissions, have their assistants be able to move further and complete multiple commissions in one round.

The winner of Tabriz is whomever has the most prestige after a player has either finished their ninth commission or has gained 14 skill points.

Tabriz was created by Randy Flynn, the designer behind the aforementioned Cascadia and a spin-off tabletop title called Tabriz: The Card Game.

Update: A representative from Crafty Games has confirmed that Tabriz was created with the help of multiple Iranian culutural consultants, as well as the fact that Flynn lived in Iran during the 1970s.

Apart from Tabriz, Crafty Games has published Mistborn: House War – a board game based on a series of fantasy novels by Brandon Sanderson – and Dollars to Donuts, a board game about building a pastry business empire. Dicebreaker has reached out to Crafty Games regarding whether a sensitivity writer or cultural consultant has been hired in the creation of Tabriz.

A crowdfunding campaign for Tabriz is set to be launched on Gamefound in September/October 2022, with pledge amounts yet to be confirmed.