Your goal in Merchants is to make as much money as possible, ideally by having the right goods at the right time to earn more at the peak of sales.
To start, lay out six goods cards face up in a demand row. Goods cards come in six colors, and the more cards of a color on display, the more in demand that good is. Each player gets a hand of three goods cards and (on the table) two ship cards; in turn, each player places a goods cube of their choice on a ship, then they place a goods cube on their other ship.
On a turn, you take two actions. The first action is one of these choices:
Exchange a goods cube on one of your ships with a cube of a different color, if available. (Each good has only five cubes.)
Buy a special card, which are explained below.
Pass.
The second action is one of these choices:
Play goods cards of one color onto cards in the demand row, placing each card played onto a different spot in the demand row, covering the card already present; after you do this, each player with cubes of the color played receives 1 coin for each visible card of this color per cube on their ships. (For example, if red was played and you have two red cubes and three red cards show in the demand row, you gain 6 coins.)
Draw two goods cards from the deck.
The special cards you can buy aren't worth money on their own, but they can help you earn more coins:
Ship (costs 10 coins): After buying the ship, place a goods cube from the reserve on it.
Office (8 coins): After your second action, draw a goods card from the deck; if you have three offices, draw three cards.
Docker (12 coins): If you exchange goods for your first action, you can exchange one extra goods cube per docker you have.
Trade agreement (11 coins): If you earn coins in any player's second action, gain 2 extra coins per trade agreement you have.
When the goods deck runs out, the game ends immediately. Whoever has the most coins wins.
- Amazing
- love this game
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
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- Count of the Nine Estates. Um, a game people keep suggesting to me and I've played it over the years off and on and I think it's not bad.
- Distilled clear Srank. It's such an amazing game. I absolutely love this.
- Draftosarus, also the game I very much enjoy. I will give this an A. S would be too much, but it's such a cute and nice uh drafting game.
- Cluster. Uh you have um a circle made of like a rope like a ropes circle rope circle so to speak and everybody gets like the same number of magnets and you put the magnets in the middle and when you put down your last magnet you win.
- Exobase also a game that I will bring a video to you at some point.
- Magic Keys in English. I think um this is like a children game actually. It's a children's game, but we play like with like I think we were like four adults playing that.
- Malus Hotos. I just released a preview video for that for the Kickstarter campaign and I enjoyed this game a lot.
- Micro City is a pretty decent game in a small box. Um, but it's also nothing all too amazing, right?
- Reforest clear as this is an absolutely amazing game.
- Sally Face Strange Nightmares uh for the video game uh Sally Face and I found this game quite decent actually.
- Stone Spine Architects uh in the roleplayer universe. And I like this a lot. I will give this an A.
- Switch and signal. I'm a little conflicted on that one.
- Yatsi. Yeah, this is like a guilty pleasure, right? We all know it's not an amazing game, but Yatsi is the basis for like a lot of other games with this mechanism of rolling your like rolling your dice and then being able to reroll some of them twice.
- Buds and Blooms from Mark Tuck. Also a game that I enjoyed playing.
- And actually, you know what? I'm actually missing one game. I also played Wingspan.
- Wingspan would also be an S of course and would be up here.
References (from this video)
- Favorite deck builder
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Deck Building — Identified as a favorite deck builder.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- STI, I will give this an A. I played this twice. I really like the game. I don't know how much I will like it in the long run, but I really enjoyed and I could imagine actually owning it.
- It's like a um it's kind of a tile puzzling and resource management game. Um in a pretty short play time, very simple, very red, like very streamlined, which I like. Um but it like at the end it wasn't too special.
- One of my most favorite word games. I would give this an A. We're trying to like um prevent goats from taking like the letters from a from a printing office. Very very cool.
- Star Wars Imperial saw to play for the first time. Um and we're actually playing it again today. And I really like what I really like this. Um there was a lot of setup. The setup isn't very streamlined.
- Tiny Towns on my list for a while. Finally, I got a copy and I really like this. I will give this an A for now as well.
- Walking Birano. I will have to like do this here because this one also gets an S. Like always a great game to play. Really love this little puzzly game.
- Wingspan amazing amazing my most favorite game ever. You know that. So of course Srank
- It's a very good uh word game. I would give this a B. I enjoy that one.
- Duel which is fine. It definitely is not as good as Azour. It's It's a fine enough game. I would probably play it again if you asked me, but I don't understand why it exists.
- At the Helm, a deck building game by Buttonsh Games with only 18 cards, which is pretty good. Um, I'll give this an A as well.
- Animal Kingdoms. That one surprised me. It's like a uh you like place cards down in specific regions and you're trying to get like the majority there.
- And then Aon's End, of course, always gets an S for me. It's my most favorite solo game, and that will probably not change for a while.
- And then I've also finally gotten Seventh Content. I got a like a huge collection. I've got almost everything that you can get at retail, uh, including like the cool white box and stuff. Um, and I would give this I've only played this once, but I would give it an A for now.
- Loads of A ranks this time. Not bad. Not bad. Um, and a lot of B's as well and quite a lot of S's. No D's this time and only a few C's.
References (from this video)
- Secondary market demand led to a print run, making it accessible
- They had never played the original
- Would not have played it if not for the secondary market interest
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
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- We don't want to just buy more kaixes. We don't want to just get more shelves. We we want to only have games we play.
- It's not like we're desperate for any of those. That's the kind of thing we can hunt for on other places, but it's just Yeah, it's hard to do.
- I think it's something we all kind of struggle with as board game hobbyists, but at the same time, there's a small part of us that's kind of like, uh, I have to figure out where to store this.
- So, if you hear us saying in one of our videos, "Oh, this was a keeper." That means it actually means something to us.
- So, Batman Love Letter, it's a game that we um really liked. It's one of our favorite love letters. We've got other love letters, right? And they don't have a bunch of a lot of space. But for a while there, they were going for like 80 bucks or something because of the scarcity of them.
- It's a lot of work, but it's worth it to not just have stuff.
- I mean, as it is, Jul is going to be a nightmare. Imagine if it was 5,000 games or, you know, whatever.
References (from this video)
- One of my most favorite deck builders of all time
- Most played game last year and may also be one of the most played games this year.
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Deck Building — one of my most favorite deck builders of all time.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This is just my own opinion. My opinion also may change over time right? This is just a snapshot of how I feel at the moment about these games.
- Just One, one of my one of the best party games out there.
- It's a solid push your luck game that I'd like to play with my wife's family, with the in-laws.
- The gameplay is very good, but I think the app uh just takes up too much room.
- Merchants, one of my most favorite deck builders of all time.
- You like stare at the screen almost all the time. At least 60 to 70% of the time you stare at the screen
- I'm kind of sorry to putting a Seven Wonders game in uh D rank, but yeah, I just did not enjoy my time with it.
- So, yeah. Um a lot of S and A ranks as usual, but also quite a lot of B's, and we even have a D again this time.