Merchants Of The Silk Road

Five years. One road. Your family on a slaver's rope.

Thrace, 1261. Raiders burned your village in the night. Your wife is gone. Your brother, your daughter and your son walk east in the column of Kareem of Tabriz, a slaver bound for the markets of Sivas, Samarkand and Turfan, and from there to China.

You have a donkey, twenty coins and the road.

Merchants of the Silk Road is a small, story-driven trading game. You are faster than Kareem; he is richer. Buy where goods are cheap, carry them where they're wanted, and turn a handful of wool into the price of a life.

Trade the real road

• Thirty towns from Thrace to the gate of China, from Constantinople's market square to felt yurts by Lake Bosten.

• Fourteen goods: wool and dates, saffron, glass and lustre jars, silk, jade, porcelain. Every merchant pays most for what their town is short of.

• Prices fall as you flood a market. The best runs have to be found, not repeated.

Keep your caravan alive

• Bandits ride every road from Anatolia east. Hire guards, or pay their toll.

• The deserts drink your water. Travel by night, and dress your animals in loose white cloth.

• A fever runs through the caravans of the east. Carry medicine, or hire a horse doctor.

• Every hired hand is paid every day. Every animal eats.

Buy them back

• Kareem keeps his own timetable. Catch him in a city, or alongside his column on the road, and ransom whoever is still on his rope.

• Those he has sold can still be found, and bought back from their new owners.

• Every family member you free leads a string of animals of their own.

• Save enough, and you can fund his many enemies to rise and put him in chains.

A beautiful pixel art world

Plan on a pixel-art map of the Silk Road, then walk every road through the painted country itself: mountain passes, red desert, river ferries, torches lit along the way. Arrive in a town at noon, at sunset or by lamplight. The music is oud, ney and frame drum.

Many endings, one for every way the road can go.

Playable in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Turkish.