Mission: Review - Guild of Merchant Explorers
The Queen is calling for adventurers to update the kingdom’s maps! Venture out into new lands and discover cities and treasures along the way. Is this land worth exploring, or would you be better off at home? Let’s take a closer look at The Guild of Merchant Explorers and find out!
Throughout the four rounds of the game, you are going to be placing cubes on your map. The spaces in which you place cubes are determined by the card that was flipped that turn. If you fill in an entire region (all adjacent matching terrain spaces) then you build a village, gaining you points. If you place a cube on a ruin space, you find a treasure! For the first three rounds, each player will get to choose a special action from a deck of cards. These actions get activated once per round, and are very powerful. Everyone is also racing to achieve three objectives, which gives more points to the player who meets the objective first. At the end of the four rounds, the player with the most coins wins!
There are tons of board games that use exploration as their theme, check out my review on Explorers here, and it is a theme that I generally enjoy! I love the feeling of discovering something new and charting unknown territory. While The Guild of Merchant Explorers doesn’t necessarily create the feeling of discovering something new, it does give the player a sense of progression and exploration.
The action cards you draw every round might be my favorite thing about the game. Each card has really powerful actions. You want every card you see. They are all just that good. The game gives you a large stack of cards to go through too; I think you could see them all in about two or three games. Every card is different, but they all let you place a lot of cubes which greatly expands what you can explore on future turns.
However, the other deck of cards you draw from–the treasure cards–are not nearly as exciting. Some of the cards let you put down a cube, while others just get you points or are cards you need for set collection. Having more interesting treasure cards would drastically improve the game, I think. You would want to go to the ruin spaces more and look forward to drawing these cards, but, as of now, your actions are better spent trying to build villages or connect cities.
At the end of each round, you must remove all of your cubes from the board. This can become a little tedious and challenging, especially because you don’t want to move your villages or treasure tokens. I find this to be more of a slight hassle than a major detriment to the game, though I do wish there was a better solution to this issue.
The biggest setback for the game is going to be its art. There is nothing really to say about the art other than it’s there. The cover is mostly uninteresting unfortunately. The map is well done and the terrain types are very distinct, but the small spaces are not conducive to the artwork.
The game also offers a solo mode for anyone who wishes to play alone. I played a few games this way, and, while it isn’t necessarily the most exciting way to play, it is a pretty decent solo mode. You have round tokens that cover the spaces worth the most points first during the game, making each objective worth fewer points as the game progresses. This actually adds some interesting tension when playing alone and creates a fun little race to try to beat the game to the objective.
Overall, I think this is a pretty great flip-and-write style of game, where instead of writing you are placing. Maybe a flip-and-place? I would highly recommend this game to anyone who likes flip/roll-and-write games, as this has a very similar feel. The game comes with 4 different maps that all have slight variations in rules, which is great for replayability too. I can even see myself pulling this game off the shelf to play alone. Unfortunately, the uninteresting art, muted color palette, and the fiddly components are likely to make people skip this gem!
Likes
+ Map variability
+ Powerful special action cards
+ Feels like a roll-and-write game
+ Solo mode
Dislikes
- Difficult to remove cubes from the board
- Boring treasure cards
If this sounds like a game that would be fun for you, head on over to any of our two Mission: Board Games locations.
About the author: Will Purdy is an avid board game enthusiast and barista at Urban Prairie Coffee in Mission, KS. Follow him on instagram @boardgamebarista or on Board Game Geek: fidgetyrain