Ender's awesome review covers the rules and the wonderful components, so I won't repeat any of that here.

This game has mechanics that I like, and I had fun playing it, but its parts didn't quite come together to work as a competitive game. It was very tough to acquire the cards needed to carry out any sort of plan, and the options were too limiting to make alternative moves interesting. Too much time was spent simply making the move (or non-move) that the game allowed instead of making a real decision. Afterward, the winner (45 points) said that he had no idea how he managed to win. On my last turn, I managed to net a huge 11 points, thanks to the player to my right triggering a pirate attack that allowed me to take over two companies on the cheap. This put me in a tie for second at 33 points. The two players who played after me on the last turn could not do anything, which had been an all-too-common situation over the course of the game.

This is one of those games that immediately got me thinking about what might make it more competitive -- possibilities include having all the trading post tiles face-up at the start of the game, to allow for more planning, and drawing 3 cards instead of 2 on turns when you're unable to get a majority in any company. Too many times, players were forced to draw cards that still weren't enough to allow a move when the next turn rolled around.

These issues were exacerbated in our game by the fact that nearly every auction involved only 2 or 3 cards -- had we rolled a bunch of 5s and 6s, the game might have been more interesting and would have progressed much faster. So maybe another idea would be to roll the die, divide by 2 and add 3, so that each auction would have 4-6 cards instead of 1-6. This would make it easier for the auction winner to make a move (there were a few instances in our game where the winner of a cheap auction realized that he had no good move to make). Having more cards left over from an auction would also make it easier to make a useful move on one's next turn. Cutting down on the number of turns spent drawing cards would also help speed up the game.

Another thought is to award points for being in second place in a commodity. When you only get to make 6 or so moves over the course of the game, having a couple of them end up counting for nothing doesn't help the feeling that you didn't do much during the game. Granted, this may be less of an issue for games with fewer players (or when the game takes 45 minutes instead of 90).

Would I play it again? Yes, but I won't take it too seriously. I should note that 4 of the 5 players in this game were first-timers, which added significantly to the play time. This is a much more acceptable 45-minute game than 90-minute game.

Thank you for the post.