Merchants and Marauders

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

In my very early teens I had a friend.  Can you imagine?  I’d nip over to her house when her older brother was out and we’d sneak into his room.  He had a copy of Space Hulk, you see, and a poster of a lady on his wall that made me feel a bit funny.  But also, he had an Amiga.  Between Another World and failing, in our blissful pre-internet naivety, to answer the age check questions for Leisure Suit Larry, (also there was an adventure game on a steam ship, set in the 20s perhaps – like a detective thing, it was very brown and had very distinctive music – anyone?) we’d play Sid Meier’s Pirates.  At home I had a Super Mario gamewatch and a The Terminator hand-held thing, neither of which adequately prepared my brain for Pirates!’s open world.  It made an impression, it gave me that feeling.  And it’s that feeling that this month’s subject encapsulates in an hour-long boardgame, that feeling which you get to share with three other people.  It’s…

I was a little bit nervous reading Merchants and Marauders’ rulebook.  I could see a gulf developing between me starting to explain the game and the point at which it becomes fun.  A gulf where people’s attentions drift, their eyes move ever more frequently towards the TV, and they start to hate you cus you never shut up saying stuff.

It starts simply: you randomly draw a “Captain” card telling you who you are and what you’re good at, you pick a sloop if you fancy piratey stuff or a flute if you want to trade cargo, and you set sail making three actions per turn: move your ship between regions or in and out of port, port to trade, upgrade, accept missions or gather rumours, and scout to intercept and attack merchants, NPCs or your fellow players.  Pick any three, any number of times (except “port” which can be performed only once per turn).  There’s your basic mechanic – wallop, even your granny gets it.

Upon this simple skeleton are a number of slightly more complicated systems which simulate things like raiding merchant ships, ship combat, boarding combat, the actions of NPCs, upgrading and repairing your ship and the economics of trade goods in different regions.  Now before you think “well sling this over a rainbow – this isn’t the game for me, it sounds like far too much hard work”, somehow – some flipping how – it all works.  It becomes remarkably fluid when you actually start playing.

I’ll give you a little example of one of Merchants’ beautiful little economies of design.  Here’s how trade works.  These are Cargo Cards:

When you’re in port you take six of them from the top of the Cargo Card deck.  In this port, Tortuga say, the deck has randomly given me one tobacco, one wood, one textiles and three sugar.  tobacco, wood and textiles are obviously not in huge supply in this port – as there’s only one of each card, I’d have to pay three gold to buy each one.  But there’s loads of sugar – three cards!  Which means I can buy them for only one gold each.  Oh look!  Havana nearby shows sugar as being “In Demand”.  If I can ship them there I can make six gold for each unit – a profit of 15 gold!

I’ve used one action to port, I’ll use another to move out to sea and… hell, let’s use the third to scout for a merchant ship to fill the rest of my hold with its plunder.  Yarrr.

My captain’s quite good at scouting for ships, with a skill level of three.  So I roll three of Merchants and Marauders’ special dice.  All I need is one of them to show a jolly roger… it’s a success!

I’ve discovered an English merchant and I attack it!  Sure, I’ll have a bounty put on my head by England so I won’t be able to enter any English ports but Havana is my destination for the time being and it’s under Spanish control.  Caution to the winds.  Yarr.  To see how the attack goes I look to the Cargo Deck again, and draw three cards…

OK, so the explodey symbol at the bottom means I’ve taken a point of damage to my masts and a point of damage to my cannons in the conflict.  The third symbol means the merchant tried to escape me once but my ship was manoeuvrable enough to prevent it (the merchant needed equal or more escape symbols than the manoeuvrability of my ship to flee successfully).  My ship’s taken a couple of knocks, and now England don’t like me much, but I can take on two of its cargo which fills my hold – one of which is another sugar!  I also plunder the amount of gold to which the numbers on those cards add up.  Onwards to Havana, to repair and sell my booty.  Yarrr.

So you can see that Merchants utilises one card deck for two of the game’s fundamental mechanics.  How tidy and easy to remember.

A lot of the stuff in Merchants is based upon a similar dice check to the Scouting one used above as well.  Roll the number of dice equal to your skill number – the more skulls, the better you do.  With only four stats to keep track of for each captain it’s hardly mind boggling, but allows the game a great amount of flexibility by boiling choice and resolutions down to a few dice throws.  Added to it are these lovely little player boards which everyone uses to keep track of everything from Captain’s stats to ship stats, damage and cargo.  Here’s me from last night before I was sunk by a Spanish frigate in a torrent of unlucky dice throws.

It’s just crazy the amount Merchants and Marauders contains, and how tightly it’s all packed into a game that can easily take under an hour.  I haven’t even told you about the Event Cards, one of which is drawn every turn.  They dictate the activities of NPC ships while simulating background events like the outbreak of war or the changing allegiances of the regions.  I haven’t talked about rumours, which can be gleaned in ports, offering a daring Captain certain danger and maybe some gold too.  I haven’t mentioned specialists who can be recruited to bolster your crew; carpenters, gunners, surgeons and more.  Nor have I really said anything about ship modifications or special weaponry.  Goodness.

I haven’t yet told you anything about how to win the game but now I will.  To win Merchants and Marauders you simply need to get ten “Glory”.  There are a number of ways to get Glory.  I won’t list them all but they are numerous and basically allow you to play the game however you feel inclined be that by completing rumours or missions, beating enemy captains in combat or trading lots of goods – all will earn you a glory point.

Subsequently, there’s no sense that there’s the single track to victory.  If you want to be simply a cargo-humping merchant, you can win that way.  If you want to be the sneakiest privateer, picking on the weak – by all means hang around a port and terrorize the local trade route.  If you want to stay on the right side of the law but fancy a fight, go after the your nefarious opponents or set to investigating all those mysterious rumours.  If your boots are big enough you could even try to plunder a naval Man-o-War, a monstrous ship that cannot be obtained by any other means.  Merchants and Marauders is a game that’s far from complicated or arduous in length yet it buzzes with life, variety and choice.  This is its essence, and the reason it so reminds me of the giddiness I felt playing Pirates! way back when.  It even comes with little treasure chests.

Two people made $10,000 each by designing board games recently.  Days of Wonder make a game called Ticket to Ride and they wanted their fans to design an expansion so offered said wedge-o-cash as part of a competition.  Ticket to Ride involves creating railway routes around different parts of the world and the new expansions by the competition winners take Legendary Asia and the Indian Subcontinent as their geographical subjects.  If you want to try games made by real people rather than hard-bitten, scaly board game designer types, go seek them out.You know when you play loads of computer games and you think “wow, I could make a really amazing game, I have so many good ideas…” then you remember you can’t program or do graphic art and stuff?  Well, one of the brilliant things about board games is that it’s so easy to turn your ideas into reality.  All you really need is a few scraps of paper… I’ve been into board games for a comparatively short amount of time and already I have concepts for a The Thing type game and a Magnificent Seven type game.  Now I just need someone to offer me $10,000 to really get me motivated.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.