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Mc Jarvis
United States
Too much geek gold was spent on this text.
This heart is meant to convince you that I feel.
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The lure of pirates is a well known thing in popular culture. (If you don't believe me, just ask a ninja.) It is perhaps a tribute to just how obsessed board gamers are with trade, then, that in this game the Merchants are given the place of honor in the title. Don't let that fool you, though, because in Merchants and Marauders everyone can be a bit pirate-y by the end of the game. This is fortunate for me especially, I think. My love of pirates will eventually be known to most people I game with, since I have a bad habit of inserting pirate elements in games. Even the well known Puerto Rico is in fact a game about stockpiling goods on ships until they are raided by pirates and you have to start over.
Ah, such is life. On to an exciting game experience!
The Hook:
Before buying & playing this game, the one thing I read about time and time again in reviews was that the theme carried the game. If you take anything away from my writing here, I think that is the most important point. This is a game which, once you know the rules well(a caveat I will get to later), really effectively replicates the feel of sailing around the Caribbean, buying and trading goods, raiding merchants, and killing off enemy captains. Arr! The rules all essentially exist to reinforce this theme, the production quality is high with lots of plastic toy ships, fold-together 3D treasure chests, money that is nicely cut into irregular "ancient coin" shapes, and cards which give you not only goals, but stories of your pirate-y adventures, escapades, and scandalous affairs. All of these items add up to an experience that results on you thinking about changing careers to a life of crime on the high seas. If you're imagining yourself in a room playing a game at the end of this gaming voyage, something has gone horribly wrong.
The Rules:
The rules of the game are fairly simple at heart, but the specifics of the rules are complex in execution. Simply put, every turn you'll take three actions. You may select to either move 1 space on the board (one sea space, out of a port, or into a port), you may scout a sea zone for other ships (ie- to fight them), or you may take a port action, in which you will trade goods in a port, upgrade your ship, acquire missions, or find rumors. Unfortunately, explaining what all of these actions mean takes a long time. I wish the designer had come up with a way to dramatically decrease the explanation time required to play the game. The complex rules are a stumbling block for teaching new players, in my experience.
A brief, but more detailed look:
Basically you have a captain and a ship. You sail around the game board using one of three actions, and you are trying to accrue glory points. Everything in the game will get you a glory point. This means the game is something of a choose-your-own-adventure. You can get glory points for sinking ships, raiding merchant vessels, trading goods, taking missions from local towns to far & away dangerous places, or hunting down rumors of treasure & fortune.
Ship attributes colour coded to associated ship hit-points.
Notice how "Toughness" goes to two different stats and Maneuverability does not match with anything.
This can confuse new players.
The captain has 4 attributes which tell you how good he is at doing things (maneuvering at sea, looking for other ships, leading his crew, and influencing port officials) Whenever he wants to do one of these activities, he just rolls as many dice as he has in the attribute being used. If he rolls a skull on any of the dice, he wins! The net result here is that skill checks are extremely quick, since you are just looking to see if a skull is rolled on the dice.
The ship has 5 attributes. These attributes roughly correspond to how many "hit points" the ship can take in various sorts of battles to various aspects of the ship. (Hull, Cargo, Masts, Crew, and Cannons) Losing some or all of any of the hit points on different parts of your ship will disable you in different ways. No crew left? Better hope no one boards you- things could get ugly. No cannons? Better run for the hills! You can't fire back at your enemy!
At the start of the game you will be given a random captain. Knowing his abilities, you will have to pick a ship for him to sail: There is one that is more pirate-y, and one that is more merchant-y. Using the combination of captain and ship that you pick, you will have to set out in the game to attain glory. Do you have large cargo stores and a captain with lots of influence? Maybe buying goods in one port and selling them at other ports where they are in demand is necessary. Do you have great ability at sailing? Maybe you should try to fight other players and bring them down!
A minor note about rules which I will revisit later- there are a lot of them. The rules explanation for this game is pretty long for a game that is primarily not about strategic & tactically exacting play. It doesn't even have the advantage that Descent or Arkham Horror seem to have, where one player can basically know what's going on and carry the rest of the group. It's very easy for new players to get completely creamed in M&M due to not understanding how vulnerable they are at combat, or missing their chance to kill you just because they don't see how a lowly Flute is no threat at all to their Frigate.
The Session:
I played three "sessions" of this game.
The first was a longer session consisting of two 2-player games I played by myself to teach myself the game. In both games I decided to play one merchant and one pirate. Predictably, the first game was a slow and grinding process where I was looking up a different rule every other minute. The second game was much smoother, and I felt I would really enjoy the game once I got a chance to teach some players. The ease of avoiding combat with other players made for non-interactive games. I had some concerns about the feel this non-interaction gave the game, but thought that perhaps it would be solved with a 4-player experience.
Enterprising BGG members have shown that
painting the ships can lead to beautiful results.
The second was a 4-player game I introduced to my "lighter" game group. This group had successfully tackled Descent, so I thought it would be a great fit for them. Unfortunately one of the players did not really get the game, and we had to explain the rules to her almost every turn. This led to a frustrating experience, where she was uncomfortable because she could tell she was slowing down the game, and where the remaining players were bored because we didn't have anything to do on her turns. At several points during this session quitting was discussed, and I was somewhat disheartened. Not because I enjoyed the game and my friends did not, but because I did not enjoy the game despite thinking I would.
My third session was a 3-player game with two of my friends who are quite capable with heavier games, but like lighter fare as well. The rules explanation went pretty smoothly, as did the game. But we played in relative silence, and due to a random event trigger a war which kept us out of many ports, it was difficult to play the game. I ended up getting shut out of every port in the game except my own port (very debilitating for any sort of player) due to a bad string of luck, the merchant player was deep in English waters when his country declared war on the English, which severely limited his options(since he could not enter English ports anymore), and the remaining pirate player also had difficulties along the same lines. Storms made the entire situation worse, since storms make it difficult to move around the map and we drew quite a few of them as random events. In the end the excercise was one in futility rather than any of us feeling like we were pirates and merchants seeking adventure.
So, all games I played with actual other players were somewhat negative. I suspect that if I had my old D&D group from college to play with this game would get a lot of play time, but that era of my life is over. Sadly, this game will likely join the ranks of my Splotter games on the game shelf- loved in my heart, but never played in reality due to the narrow audience the game is broadcasting to.
Important BGG Community Aspects:Most captains fill the role of dashingly-handsome rogues.
One thing not mentioned in many reviews of this game is the thriving BGG community that current exists for the game. One of the designers of the game (Christian Marcussen) is very active on the forums and will happily chat with anyone who is playing & enjoying his game. I hesitate to speak for him, but the vibe I get from him is that he believes everyone should use the game as they see fit to evoke the most fun out of it possible. This means the variants forum for the game is a very happening place, and there are all kinds of "fixes" to the game for whatever your specific group thinks ails it. Think the game is too isolated and it should be more combative? There is a "cut throat" variant that Christian has been very enthusiastic about. Think everyone should take their turns at the same time? Christian says at one point the game was like that- and will happily advise reasons why it was changed, but emphasize that you should play however makes you happiest.
The Breakdown:
Because of the previously mentioned "Variants" community, I think Merchants & Marauders does not offer a strategy game such as Through the Ages, to be enjoyed competitively against strangers online or people you randomly meet at conventions with a standard set of rules. Rather, I think it deserves to be viewed as a Gaming System comparable to either D&D, or maybe even Claustrophobia. This dynamic nature is the essence of why this game is so "hot" on the hotness list and why the forums for it are so happenin'. It's a game that can be to you whatever you want out of it, as long as you and your friends are willing to spend a little bit of extra time on it. I could easily see this being a game I would have purchased back in college & played as the go-to game with my gaming buddies, or used as a backdrop for D&D campaigns, or whatever. (Did I mention the mini's are gorgeous, the map is thoroughly engaging, and the treasure chests are fold up 3D models?)
The fundamental problem with it is the ruleset, though. There is no way around knowing every single rule of the game to have a good time. Additionally, if people are not versed in the rules they are bound to suffer a little from AP and downtime between turns will take a long time. Granted, there are probably house-rules you can invent to solve these problems(Parallel turns to solve downtime between turns is suggested as one possible variant in the forums), but there are those who will be bothered by such failures in the game's base ruleset.
My final take? This game comes down to who you have to play with. I would absolutely love to play this game with people who were excited about it, but no one I taught the game to seemed to have the same enthusiasm for it that I did.
Pros:
*Can make you feel like a Pirate
*Can make you feel like an important trader
*Can make you feel like an important traitor (Go ahead and sink your own countries' ships!)
*Variable system that is very open to house-rules
*Despite house-rules being encouraged, I feel the game is very balanced with the base set of rules
*Heavy box of high quality bits means you get your money's worth
Cons:
*Complex rules make it a difficult game to teach to new people. Groups that hop from game to game probably won't like this
*Downtime between turns can make for a boring experience with new players
*Complexity of the rules almost ensures there will be something you won't like about them. Customization is almost necessary to ensure maximum enjoyment
*Heavy box of high quality bits might cause back problems down the line
-Michael
PS- A Mathematician's Warning:
It's probably worth noting that a seemingly vocal group of people seem to think the game is unbalanced. It's almost comical, though, that this group is divided on exactly what is unbalanced, sometimes contradicting themselves. This game is not an easy game to analyze mathematically or strategically. As a mathematician myself, I urge you great caution when reading things on the forums about certain strategies being "risky, but not that risky" or some similar soft reference to statistics. I've seen many mistakes on the forums in these casual references, and because of this I think Christian's "do what you think is best" mantra is probably the best tack. Analyzing this game in too great of detail will likely suck the soul & fun out of the game, and it is certainly impossible to analyze "lightly".
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On deck: Stronghold
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Ship attributes colour coded to associated ship hit-points.
Enterprising BGG members have shown that
Most captains fill the role of dashingly-handsome rogues.
