The Merchant Expeditions Guild: don’t check boxes, place cubes

What is board game The Merchant Expeditions Guild?

In The Merchant Expeditions Guild , you play as explorers sent by the queen to map her kingdom. Starting from the capital, you extend to the ends of the known lands. Like any self-respecting merchant, you take advantage of it to accumulate wealth… there are no small profits!

Accessible from 10 years old, for 1 to 4 players, the game can be played with family or friends, with games lasting around 40 minutes.

Edited by Origames, The Merchant Expeditions Guildis a game by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert, illustrated by Gerralt Landman, and sold for €43.90 at Philibert.

How to play The Merchant Expeditions Guild ?

Establishment

Installation couldn’t be faster. Each player takes a map (yes, this word exists in French, as in “world map”) identical to that of the other players and places it in front of him.

These maps are divided into hexagonal squares representing different landscapes (grassland, desert, mountain or sea), and in the center stands the capital of the kingdom.

In the center of the layout, a small board allows you to arrange the exploration cards to be drawn at each turn. Each player has classic cubes and house-shaped cubes representing a village. Small tokens are used to mark the trade posts acquired and the observation towers conquered on the board. Other coins symbolize the money earned throughout the game.

How does a game of The Merchant Expeditions Guild work?

Each turn, reveal a card from the exploration deck. They indicate the procedures to follow when placing the cubes. They specify the type of spaces (meadows, sea or mountain) as well as the number of cubes to be placed. Players simultaneously place exploration cubes on corresponding spaces on their map, either adjacent to their capital or to another cube. Little by little, their area of ​​exploration extends.

If you place a cube on a space containing a coin, you immediately receive a coin. That’s the goal of the game: to be the richest at the end (remember, you’re merchants). If you connect two cities together, you establish a trading post, which also earns you many coins, more or less depending on the cities concerned. You can also discover observation towers, which are difficult to reach, or wrecks containing treasures.

But, if everyone has the same map and solves the same exploration cards in the same order, do we all have the same thing in the end? No, because from time to time each player receives a special exploration card, solved by him alone.

When all the cards have been revealed, the round ends, and you then remove all the cubes from your map. If you have completely explored an area (a group of contiguous squares of the same type), you place a village there. Later in the game, these villages serve as a starting point for your explorations, just like your capital.

The game ends after the fourth round, and the wealthiest merchant wins.

In The Merchant Expeditions Guild we don’t tick boxes, but we put cubes and we love

The Merchant Expeditions Guild is a ticking game, in which… you don’t tick anything. It’s smart, since it allows you to empty some boxes at the end of the round. In a “real” ticking game, you would have had to erase, erase, etc. In short, it would have been painful.

Either, this little sleight of hand can renew the genre a little, but does that make it a good game for all that? Oh yeah !

The rules are very simple, the rounds dynamic, everyone plays at the same time, there’s no time to get bored. This is the type of game where you enjoy seeing your area develop, here the cubes explore the kingdom little by little. All the salt of the game is in the way we use the cards: we know that they will all arrive, but not in what order. Several strategies are possible, but it is better to avoid dispersing. Despite principles that have little to do with it, we find the same sensations there as in the very nice MyCity(minus the evolutionary aspect).

In addition to the objectives drawn at random in each game, the game has the good idea to offer several different maps. Some add specific rules for even more renewals.

We also appreciate its design, with maps that look like they came out of an old geography book. However, we would have liked them to be a little larger (or smaller cubes and tokens), because as they stand, it affects readability a little when a lot of boxes are filled, and makes handling a little painful. Nothing prohibitive so far.

On the other hand, the interaction between the players is limited to its bare minimum: the race for objectives to be the first to achieve them. For everything else, everyone plays in their corner, without any possibility of influencing the decisions or placements of others. This is neither a defect nor a criticism, just some players want to be able to interact with their opponents, while others appreciate not being attacked, blocked or bothered.

Why play The Merchant Expeditions Guild?

The Merchant Expeditions Guildis a very nice game to (almost) check, which manages to renew the genre. Simple, visually pleasing, fast, full of good little ideas, peaceful, it quickly becomes addictive. We want to go back to explore the maps, try other strategies, adapt even better to the order in which the cards are drawn, make a bigger score. The lack of interaction, prohibitive for some, nevertheless has the advantage of being able to offer it to anyone, especially beginners, who are not likely to be frustrated or to be bothered by others.

Finally, if you’re as hooked on the game as we are, you have the option of adding a small extension to it, which adds two new maps and their related objectives.

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