Final Frontier Games continues “The Five Realms” saga with another excellent game that adds a new twist… each character is essentially a game itself inside the main game. Read on for more information.
BGG Description
Welcome ashore! Merchants Cove is a highly asymmetrical eurogame where each player assumes the role of a different fantasy merchant with a unique shop. The merchants contend to sell their goods to the arriving adventurers at the cove’s piers—the most famous markets in the Five Realms. Each player uses their own set of role-specific components and gameplay mechanisms to produce their goods, increase their shop’s efficiency, and—most importantly—get rich!
Though the merchants work independently in their specialized shops, they compete against each other to attract customers, influence the demands for goods, and secure sponsorships from the four faction halls. To get an edge, merchants can employ local townsfolk to work in their shops as staff. Or if they dare to cut corners, they can gain leverage from the corrupt lair of rogues—but at what cost? After three days of selling at the markets, the wealthiest merchant shall be declared the winner!
—description from the publisher
Weight 2.76/5
A Little More Info
To dive right into this section, I want to tell you what all is available for the game so you can understand as more is explained:
Base Game: Contains all you need to play the game. To highlight some of the key components:
• The four base characters you can play are the alchemist, blacksmith, sea captain, and the chronomancer & assistant. Each has a unique gameplay and staff boards.
• There are three types/factions of townsfolk cards; the locals, mercenaries, and sailors. Each set provides different instant abilities to help throughout the game.
• Sixty corruption cards that will reverse your score if you have any left at the end of the game. Some of those cards can also help you if you keep them. But does it balance out?? You will have to wait and see.
• Three rogue cards to choose from to keep you on your toes. One card is basic to introduce you to the rogues and the other two when used correctly can give you a good advantage for a price of course.
• Six unique boats in which you load the adventurers in on their way to docking at Merchants Cove.
Secret Stash Expansion: Contains all unlocked and daily awards from the Kickstarter campaign. This expansion will be available in retail. There are a lot of additions in this expansion to enhance your play.
• Additional corruption cards that allow you to pay a certain price to get rid of it.
• Four new sets of townsfolk cards that adds additional variety of abilities to boost your game.
• New rogue cards that work with the original and new townsfolk cards.
• Three new boats, two 5-seaters and one 2-seater, to provide you additional adventurers coming into the docks. Along with the new boats are eight boat setup cards that gives you a random setup for each round of play.
• A solo mode and scenarios are provided if you just want to play the game alone but with some challenges.
• And much, much, more…
Innkeeper character: Remember Mr. Nasty from Cavern Tavern? He is back as additional character you can choose to play. He also allows a fifth player to join in the game.
Oracle character: The Oracle adds a roll and write mechanic to the game. She also allows a fifth player to join in the game (but not a sixth).
Dragon Rancher character: Who doesn’t like dragons in a fantasy realm? The Dragon Rancher also allows a fifth player to join in the game (again, no sixth player).
Merchants Cove is played over three rounds that has four phases. The arrival phase is where you load each boat with two adventurers with following the additional rules on the rogue card.
The production phase is where each player takes turns performing the actions of their character using time on the clock until you reach the market indicator on the clock. During this phase you also draw an adventurer from the bag and add them a boat if you pass certain markers, docking the boat if it is full. If all the piers are full, you will then proceed to the next phase once all players timeclocks meet up with or pass the market indicator.
The next phase is the market phase in which you can sell your goods at the Bazaar Pier (large goods), Grand Plaza Pier (small goods) or at the Black Market Pier (all goods but you get a corruption card). You also earn coins based on sponsorships that you have with each of the Faction Halls during this phase as well.
The cleanup phase is where you prepare the game board for the next round and if applicable, your individual character board. This is skipped if it is the third round, which you would go to final scoring that involves earning gold from the factions also taking away gold from corruption.
What we like about the game
WOW. Where to start? This game is another hit for us by a company that we have grown to love with each title they have released in the series.
Between my wife and I (at the time I was writing this during the week) we have played four of the seven characters so far with my sister adding one more to the count. Each character provides new and exciting ways to create goods and to gain faction sponsorships. We really enjoy that no two characters are doing the same type of actions for producing the goods. Each character does have two common actions which are recruit townsfolk (same for everyone) and activate staff (each character has three unique activations and one common). We like that some characters are easier to use and some it feels like they are for more experienced gamers.
We do love the continuity in the artwork from one game to the next. Mihajlo Dimitrievski aka “The Mico” (same artist who has done the North Sea & West Kingdom games) is a great artist and we appreciate his work.
Next, the quality of the game pieces and the cardboard items is top notch. The organizer for the base game is great as well because of the overlays that are included showing and telling you what goes where. One thing I would have done differently though is have another box with the same type of organizers for the additional characters that are not part of the base game.
Last thing to mention is that the instructions for the core and for each character are one of the best we have seen in a while. We had no issues with finding things and understanding what to do. The game overview on the back of the manual is spot on and explains what we need to know in a summary form, so much so that for the first time we can remember we can say that player aides are not needed for the game at all.
What we don’t like about the game
Our biggest complaint would be that the game does take a long time to get through. The main reason behind this is that everyone takes their turn in order of priority and if you are unsure what you are doing you can easily spend five minutes trying to decide on your action(s) you want to do. There is an option for simultaneous play that we will try after we have a few more games in without teaching new players. However, my initial feeling about this is that it may be harder to decide what strategy you want to do based on previous players turns if everyone is playing at once. This opinion may also change as we table the game more as well.
The other complaint is that the game is a table hog. You need to make sure that you have a big enough table for the main board and each character’s boards. The more players you add to the game, the bigger the space needed.
FINAL THOUGHTS
We have really enjoyed “The Five Realms” series by Final Frontier Games. Each game in the series just gets better and better and with the next game already in full production mode (Bardwood Grove) we are looking forward to getting that one on the table too.
Even though we should have tabled Merchants Cove when we first got it delivered, we waited until we tabled Rise to Nobility first (see Entry 54) to follow the story line. It is not necessary to play the games in order because each one is a fully independent and are different from one another but we find it more fun to do it that way because “each one becomes a new top game once played.”
Again, with Merchants Cove, we love how unique each character in the game is and how they add their own story to it. Looking back to Cavern Tavern, where it all began, everyone has the same role, so this game is definitely the right step forward in gameplay evolution.
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