Silk Path Journey

In the age of the Tang dynasty, the Silk Road runs longer than any road on earth, and a good deal more dangerous. You lead a caravan down it, from the harbors of eastern China toward the walls of Constantinople. Deserts and frozen passes lie between, and the cities that grew rich off everyone who came through.

You don't measure this road in miles. You measure it in days, in worn axles, in the water still left in the barrels, in how long your people will keep following you.

Every day costs you something

Food runs low, and water faster. Pack animals tire and sicken; some die in the night. Carts crack against stone and sand. Your people need feeding, and when the road turns cruel their nerve is the first thing to go. Defeat here doesn't come from a bad dice roll. It comes the day you've nothing left to hand over.

Trade is what keeps you moving. Buy silk where it's common and carry it to where it's rare: a bolt that's ordinary in Chang'an buys a small fortune in Byzantium. There are catches. Customs men want their share at every gate. A language you can't speak adds a fifth to every price. And the false-bottomed cart full of untaxed goods stays a blessing right up until an inspector taps the wood and hears it ring hollow.

The world you cross

• 46 real cities along the trade routes, from Chang'an and Samarkand to Baghdad, Lhasa and Constantinople. Each one has its own goods and prices, and its own particular way of ruining you.
• Eight languages standing between you and a fair deal. Learn them from teachers in the big cities, or hire a translator and borrow a tongue you never studied.
• Over a hundred road events, many of them lifted from real history: Sogdian traders, refugees off some distant war, bandits, fever, a storm that pins the caravan down for days. Each asks you to choose, then holds you to it.
• Companions matter, and they cost you. A guard, a guide, a healer, a translator, a merchant. Each one opens choices you'd never have alone, and each can be wounded or killed, or turned against you when morale gives out.

Survive, then go again

Make camp to hunt for supplies, rest the crew, patch the carts, or settle tempers before things boil over. There's sickness to treat and a reputation that follows you from one city to the next, and the road wears everything down sooner or later. When a run ends, and runs do end, you keep something from it: new starting backgrounds and routes, plus whatever the last attempt beat into you, so the next caravan gets a little farther than the last.

A survival-and-trade game about how much the small decisions weigh when the road is this long.