Rostam and the Seven Trials
What the road is, and nothing about what is waiting on it.
Rostam is the biggest figure in the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi's Book of Kings. For a thousand years he has been the one they send when there is nobody left to send. He comes from Zabol, out east, not from the court. He lives for centuries, he wears a coat of tiger skin, and he is loyal to the crown without ever once being impressed by the man wearing it. Kings break things. Rostam is who turns up afterwards.
He rides Rakhsh, the only horse that did not buckle when Rostam leaned a hand on its back. In practice the two of them are one character: the horse gets him out of trouble about as often as the mace does, and occasionally gets him into it. Rostam's father, Zal, was born white haired, left on a mountain, and raised by the Simorgh, which is how a feather you can burn for help ends up in the family.
What a khan is
A khan is not a chapter. It is a stage of a road: a stop, a stretch you have to get through before the next one exists at all. The Seven Trials, haft khan, are the seven stages of one journey into Mazandaran, and the point the poem keeps making is that they come in order and they get worse. He reaches each one already carrying what the last one did to him.
That is the shape the game borrows, and the reason it borrows it. Your fifteen pieces carry what happened to them from one khan into the next, and nothing is handed back between stages. The board resets. The army does not.
The road, sealed
Seven stages, and we are not going to tell you what is on them. Each seal says how that stretch of road behaves, which is the part you would work out in the first minute anyway. The rest is the game's to hand you, in order, when you get there.
-
Khan One
A fair fight, so you learn the board before anything else is done to you.
Built and playable -
Khan Two
The ground itself is against you. Standing still is a decision, and it costs.
Built and playable -
Khan Three
Something here you cannot see properly until it has already happened once.
Built and playable -
Khan Four
Not everything on this road attacks. Some of it offers.
Climbable, its own trial is next -
Khan Five
The first stretch where the road stops being empty country.
Climbable, its own trial is next -
Khan Six
By now the thing in front of you has an army, and it is expecting you.
Climbable, its own trial is next -
Khan Seven
The reason for the other six. It does not play by the rules they taught you.
Climbable, its own trial is next
- The lion. Rakhsh deals with it while Rostam sleeps through the whole thing.
- The waterless road. Thirst, and an animal that walks them out of it.
- The dragon. Woken three times, and twice talked out of believing his own eyes.
- The enchantress. A table laid in the middle of nowhere by somebody who is not what she looks like.
- Aulad. A local lord taken alive and put to work as a guide; the only one of the seven who is just a man.
- Arzhang. The first of the demons who actually has troops under him.
- The White Demon. The one the journey was for, at the bottom of a cave.
All of which tells you who Rostam ran into. It tells you nothing about what the board is going to do to you.
No spoilers, on purpose. There are no screenshots of the later khans on this site, and there will not be until you can play them. Every rule in this game is something the board does to you once. Reading about it first is the one way to waste it.