‘Merchants & Marauders’ Board Game Review
One of my fondest memories of videogaming in the early 1990’s was playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The idea that Nintendo’s basic 8-bit console could offer such depth and variety was astonishing to me – I could sail the length and breadth of the Caribbean, trade, build a fleet, engage in piracy or politics, I could romance the Governors daughter or even take over a town using ground troops. I’d honestly never seen anything like it. It’s clear that game designers Kasper Aagaard and Christian Marcussen were similarly enamoured by Pirates! and similar games, and the result is the unbelievably flexible 2010 board game; Merchants & Marauders.
Merchants & Marauders is a sandbox game in the truest sense of the word. Two to four players each begin the game with a randomly selected captain and a choice of boat; either the fast, manoeuvrable sloop, or the slower, tougher and larger fluyt. Their choice hints at future intent – with the sloop being the ship of choice for pirates and the fluyt offering a better choice for peaceful merchanting. The skillset of their captain often has a bearing on this choice, with several statistics (helmsmanship, influence, etc) and a special ability all adding sway over the decision.
Whatever path a captain might later choose, everyone begins in a friendly town (associated with the nationality of their captain) and without a bounty to tarnish their reputation. The board features a number of key ports and towns around the central Caribbean and Central America, each of which will be seeded with a ship upgrade, a merchant token and a demand token. A couple of mission cards will be drawn and placed in the spaces indicated, and several NPC ships (both pirates and navy) will wait ominously for a summons from the Event deck which will come into play at the beginning of the first full turn.
From here, the objective of the game is simple – but how players choose to fulfil it is up to them. Simply put, the endgame will be triggered when one player reaches ten glory points – either visibly via the tracker on the board, or because they announce that they have secured enough gold in their personal stash (represented by a cardboard treasure chest) to bolster their onboard score sufficiently to reach ten glory at a rate of ten coins per point. As you would expect, there are many ways to win glory, and in general Merchants & Marauders does a great job of rewarding players for things they want to do anyway – valuable trades, taking a large prize from merchant ships, defeating pirate or navy captains, completing missions or rumours and so on.
This can give Merchants & Marauders a slightly overwhelming feel to begin with, but the counter to this is to teach the game as a storytelling experience rather than an optimisation puzzle. Merchants & Marauders is not a game in which a player can plot every move perfectly and expect everything to go their way – it’s a game that offers a structure in which the players can operate as they almost roleplay the character that best suits them at the time. If you want to start the game as a harmless trader, then flip to a life of piracy once you can afford to buy and upgrade a frigate, then you can. Similarly, some captain skillsets help them focus on either missions or rumours because they are fast and have a higher chance of rolling the right outcomes on the lovely custom dice.
On that subject, many things in Merchants & Marauders require a check or dice roll of some sort. Whilst missions are black and white – you do whatever the mission tells you and then take the reward – rumours have an aspect of uncertainty. These cards – picked up in bars at a cost of two gold to represent free-flowing beer – offer a tantalising reward if they prove to be true. To find out, you’ll need to sail to wherever the rumour is said to be present, then roll dice to see if it really is. If you fail, then you may end up simply discarding the rumour – whilst those that are true tend to offer a decent reward for a relatively low amount of effort.
Dice rolling is also present in combat, which can result in one player losing their ship, their goods and upgrades and potentially even their Captain. This isn’t quite player elimination because the same player can return with a new Captain and starting ship, keeping their current glory and stashed gold and beginning anew – but it is pretty brutal all the same. Ship combat comes in three flavours including: player versus merchant, player versus player, and player versus NPC ship. When attacking a merchant, the player will usually “win” by default, but the merchant may return sufficient fire to stave them off from time to time.
This is done by the player drawing cards from the trade deck, which in addition to showing trade goods, also have a gold value and a combat value. When battling a merchant the player can choose to keep drawing cards (and some abilities allow cards to be discarded, ignored or redrawn) until the total gold value is 12 or more (because that will delivery a glory point as well.) The problem is that each card may have a damage symbol (meaning the merchant has hit that part of the player ship) or an evade value (and if this exceeds the player ship manoeuvrability, the merchant escapes.) I love this system because it blends risk and reward in a thematic way that gives player agency and creates excitement.
Battling NPC’s and other players is more even-handed and works effectively the same way, with the only difference being that an inactive player will take control of the NPC ship involved in the battle. NPC pirates will scout for player ships in their zone without fail (and a successful scout will result in a battle) whilst NPC naval ships will only attack player ships that are wanted by their nation. Whilst in general I like Merchants & Marauders a lot, I have had a game or two where the presence of an early-game pirate frigate became a massive problem for all players, because it’s very, very difficult to defeat for a player with a starting ship – and some pirate captains are tough to evade as well.
I mentioned earlier that players can upgrade the sloop or fluyt to a frigate. It’s also possible to buy into a galleon (if you want to really expand your trade fleet) but there is a fifth ship in the game – the devastatingly powerful Man-O-War. This can only be obtained if it is taken as a prize from a naval power who is at war – but heaven forbid who does attempt to take one down, because without a very heavily upgraded ship and a lot of luck, that’s not a fight that can easily be won. That said, attacking a Man-O-War and defeating it is exactly the kind of moment that Merchants & Marauders delivers many of – and as the dice fall decisively on such a battle, everyone at the table will be on tenterhooks.
There are so many other interesting systems in Merchants & Marauders that it’s hard to capture them all. Another example is trading, which manages to make the most “boring” way of making a living in this kind of game interesting in its own right. When a player trades at a port, they simply draw trade goods blindly from the deck and can then choose what to buy – if one good is draw it will cost three gold, if two are drawn they will cost two each, but if three or more are drawn, they will cost just one each. Any cards that match the demand token on that port are redrawn. Once bought (or stolen) goods can be sold anywhere for three gold each, but if a player can supply the good shown on a ports demand token, then each is worth six gold. Supply three or more in demand goods and you’ll gain a glory.
Much like merchant raids, rumours and missions, trading in Merchants & Marauders manages to be super simple and elegant, yet very interesting. When purchasing a player will be acutely aware of what they draw and where they can sell it for the most profit, and this can be just as interesting as doing battle or completing missions. Some ports also modify trade – allowing more cards to be drawn, for example, whilst some Captains specialise in trade, allowing the draw to be further modified. Carefully understanding your Captain’s power and the make up of the board – influenced by dynamic effects from the event deck or the presence of players and NPC’s – is a massive part of the game.
Merchants & Marauders is probably now my favourite sandbox style game. The Golden Age of Sail theme has a huge influence on this since I love the era and anything to do with it, but my bias towards pirates, merchants and big ships doesn’t need to mask poor mechanics or a lack of gameplay here, because Merchants & Marauders would be brilliant in any other setting. It just so happens that for me, the theme that comes with 16-17th Century sailing works perfectly when you look at some of the mechanics. For example, a ship of this era couldn’t “phone ahead” to check stock, so drawing blindly makes sense – and modifiers indicate bigger trading ports, or a savvy merchant Captain. Combat is similar. I honestly just love everything about Merchants & Marauders and for me it’s an absolute must-have.
****½ 4.5/5
Merchants & Marauders is available online at 365Games.co.uk, or at your local games store. Don’t know where yours is? Try this handy games store locator
