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