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Merchant of Venus

[Description] [Resources] [House Rules] [Play Tips] [Game Summaries]

DESCRIPTION

If you like your grease immortal, your sculpture psychotic, and your genes designer, then this is the game for you. Players jet around the universe buying and selling (humorously named) goods from one race to another and reaping hefty rewards for the service (no "tiny classified ads" needed). Supernovas, "the cloud," and piracy can slow you, but shields, relics, or lazers often counteract such problems. Upgrade your ship and it carries more but travels more slowly; pick up that one extra product and another player might get maximum demand before you deliver; brave "the cloud" and eternal fog (and last #@$*%! place) might be your fate. Victory goes to the first player to reach a predetermined amount (usually between $1000 and $3000)in cash and deeds -- deeds to factories and spaceports -- but half the fun is announcing that you're "spacing" a passenger to pick up another Melf Pelt. Enjoy.

Merchant of Venus supports between three and six players (though we've never played it with fewer than four) and takes between two and five hours to complete. A word to the wise: this is you last warning -- "the cloud" sucks.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
None identified yet
HOUSE RULES
In Merchant, we like a more congenial game, so we force all telegates and relics into the pile of asteriods before turing them down and placing them out at random. Due to this alteration in the actual rules, we often have a few players out discovering civilizations and pocketing the IOU's while some others go around the board picking up relics as fast as they can. Usually the latter players can weather "the cloud" better because some of the relics help with navigation in that terrorizing area of the board.

Soon after we began playing, someone (alright, it was me) discovered that you can pull up additional "demand" counters if you sell your products one at a time (during the same turn). While sometimes lucrative, this practice was tedious and so we found that a good house rule was that players should sell off their goods all at once and factor in any demand counters that would have helped them afterward. This is still imperfect, but it speeds the game along.
PLAY TIPS
Soon to be added: preferred number of players, overall strategies, weekly tips from the winner
GAME SUMMARIES
  • 1/9/1996 (6 players) and the Winner's tip


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    AUTHOR AND CURATOR: Scott O'Neil soneil@cs.umb.edu
    MOST RECENT UPDATE: Mon March 3, 1997