Merchants and explorers

During GenCon we took part in the AEG Big Game Night. It is a huge event at Gen Con where you can try out new games from AEG and can also take some those games with you after! 😍 The main course of the night was The Guild of Merchant Explorers - it plays like a flip and write game but instead of writing you have physical components to place on your player board. Also, even though cards drawn are used by everyone, the so-called era cards will trigger individual abilities for every player! 😮

Every turn a drawn card tells where you can place your explorers (cubes) - always adjacent to your capitol or already placed pieces. 🧐 The interesting part is that you have to take back every explorer at the end of the round so you will lose progress. To save some of your progress you can create villages by fully filling up areas of the same type. Villages will remain on your map and can be used as a new starting point! 👍

Your main goal is to get as many coins as you can and there are a lot ways to get them:
💰 cover up coin spaces on your map
💰 create villages
💰 connect cities to make trade routes
💰 collect treasure by visiting ruins
💰 place discovery towers by reaching the edge of your map
💰 race for the 3 randomly chosen objectives
🧭 the game also comes with 4 different maps, each with their own rules and objectives

The unique player abilities are easily the best part of the game. 🤩 When an era card is drawn for the first time you draw 2 special cards and choose one - from then on that era card will activate that ability for you. This will make the strategy of players diverge and make games extremely replayable! 👌

This game really surprised us and we love it 🥰 - sometimes a drawn card can be painful and ruin your plans 🙀 or it could be joyfully perfect 😸. It also feels awesome to get a foothold on a distant shore so you can start your exploration from there in the next era, getting to places that were at first out of reach. We also like the art style, the pastel colors and the little wooden pieces that come with the game - it can be a bit fiddly, but tactility is why we play board games after all!