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Merchants of the Dark Road (Kickstarter – Standard)
After half a year of daylight, we must now prepare for the dark season. The roads will be treacherous but they will still need to be braved by a select few in order to keep our cities thriving. In Merchants of the Dark Road, you are one of these brave few merchants that travel the dangerous paths between cities. While the job is perilous, fame and fortune await.
Discover the capital city where most of your actions will take place using a rondel action system. Collect and produce items to add to your caravan, or sell these items to local heroes and hire them to travel with you. Manipulate the market price of items, visit the back alley sellers, or delve a nearby dungeon for magical items to gain the potential for even more coin and notoriety.
Gather lanterns to ease your passage along the dark roads as you guide your caravan to distant villages. Deliver goods and heroes to the best destinations and gain fame for your bravery! Balance the money you earn with the height of your fame because your final score after a number of game rounds will reflect the lowest of these two values.
After all, what good is a purse full of the coin if the people don’t sing songs about you, and what good is a song with an empty mug of ale?
—description from the publisher
| Ages | 12+ |
|---|---|
| Players | Solo, 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players |
| Play Time | 60m – 120m |
| Designer | Brian Suhre |
| Mechanics | Rondel, Worker Placement with Dice Workers |
| Theme | Dice, Exploration, Fantasy |
| Publisher | Elf Creek Games |
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- Merchants of the Dark Road: Patron's Provisions (2022) - Merchants of the Dark Road: Merchant Coin Pouches (2021) - Merchants of the Dark Road: Lumi Metal Coins (2021)
Bubslug
Happy to have added this to my collection, after a long wait. There are a lot of moving parts and small details to keep track of, but the game is beautifully rendered and, with patience, a blast to play. As others have noted, I think three players will be the sweet spot but I'll need more data points before coming to a firm conclusion. I'm looking forward to playing the solo option as it appears to be solid, judging by the play through which features the solo version. Rondels within rondels, with lots of dice and drm options so luck is certainly present but can be mitigated. Having to balance the two main drivers, money and prestige, makes for interesting decisions and there are many, many decision points to ponder. Delicious!!
Big B
A bit of a curious game here. It's flashy, with beautiful artwork and a decent spin on economic themes, that has lots of bits and components for a medium weight game. There's a decent amount of decision space going on, but you're pretty reactive to what the game gives you at various points in time. There's some fuzziness in the rule book where I wish they had greater clarification or more examples, though nothing deal breaking from what I've seen. It flirts with being too sprawling for the what the core is, I do wish an element or two had been slimmed down a bit, but there's some cool ideas here too. Not quite great, but decently enjoyable and replayable.