Istanbul mobile app due out in 2018

A digital version of Rüdiger Dorn’s 2014 Kennerspiel des Jahres winner Istanbul is coming later this year.

That’s the all-but-confirmed news from Acram Digital, the developer behind ports of Martin Wallace’s Steam: Rails to Riches and Eight-Minute Empire, which decided to tease its big release for this year by slowly revealing its artwork via Twitter.

A few reveals in and it’s pretty clear that the game in question is Istanbul, the dice-rolling game of bazaar shopping and assistant managing that picked up the prestigious ‘Expert Game of the Year’ award a few years ago.

The game’s challenge comes down to moving your merchant between 16 different locations, performing certain actions in order to exchange goods and ultimately collect five rubies before your rival traders.

You have trailing assistants, who must be left behind to sort out the details while you carry on – but you’ll have to go back to that location to reunite with them, or risk being left with no-one to help you fill up your wheelbarrow with precious cargo, which you can’t do alone. (You can also increase your wheelbarrow’s capacity, which will help later as you fill it to its brim.)

The easy-going Euro was recently remade as a dice game that came out last year, and this upcoming mobile port means they’ll be no shortage of ways to pick Istanbul up if you’re yet to try it out – or to play on the go if you’re already a fan.

Acram is yet to confirm full details of what we can expect from the app, but has already said it will be out sometime in 2018.