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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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Each year at Spiel, Japon Brand features a number of €10-ish card games that serve as POP pick-ups for the curious. You hmm and haw and think that maybe the game sounds interesting yet you're not sure – but the game is €10 so you give it a try anyway. Some turn out to be winners (R-Eco), some are functional if not-thrilling (Catch Out), and some fall into the category of "What was I thinking?"
For 2011, Japon Brand is offering a wide array of €30-40 deck-building games such as Dynamite Nurse Returns (yes, really!) but only a couple of games you might take a flier on because "well, it doesn't take up much room, and I can fit it in my coat if I have to". Such are the ways of Spiel and gamers who are always searching for something new.
One such game – Master Merchant, from designer Seiji Kanai through his own Kanai Factory – fits the *-building game genre featured in many other titles offered from Japon Brand in 2011, but in this case Master Merchant is a hand-building game, with no deck. On a turn, a player plays 0-2 cards from his hand, laying them face-up and visible on the table as he does so. If he acquired new cards, those also go face-up on the table. If at the start of a turn, a player has no cards in hand, he picks up all of his cards, thereby giving him access to everything – but only up to the limit of playing two cards per turn.
As you might expect from a *-building game, however, certain cards let you break the rules in various ways, including being able to play more than two cards in a turn. What are you trying to do with all that activity? Your goal is to have eight or more coins in your bank or eight or more different types of cards in your deck; in either case, doing so wins you the game instantly.
Each player starts the game with the same two cards in hand, and a card can be played face down for a coin, with your cash stash being tracked turn by turn, or played face up for its effect. The two starter cards let you (1) buy a card (paying the cost from your stash) or (2) take one coin from each player who has at least four.
Ten different face-up card piles – costing 1-4 coins and having four copies of the 1-cost card, three of the 2-cost, and so on – are available for purchase, none of which duplicate the starting cards, which means that you have only one way to buy cards outright, which means that you need to cycle through your deck quickly in order to play that card. That said, other cards naturally give you different ways to acquire cards. Playing one of the 1-cost cards lets you acquire any 1-cost card for free; another card lets you buy a face-up card from an opponent by paying her the cost of that card from your stash.
And that last qualification – buy a face-up card – is important for game play. A number of the cards let you mess with the contents of an opponent's deck, but you can't touch a player's starting cards, cards in hand or cards played face-down for coins. Thus, by playing cards face-down, you can protect them from being bought out from under you or forcibly returned to the face-up piles (for compensation, yes, but still) – but getting one coin for a card play isn't a great option given what the cards themselves can do. So decisions, decisions.
Given the size of Dominion, Ascension, Thunderstone and other deck-building games, which started large and are growing ever larger, it's fascinating to see what's possible within the forty cards of Master Merchant, which takes *-building in a different direction.
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