The Guild of Merchant Explorers Review

As a member of the Guild of Merchant Explorers, your life is full of adventure! But your real journey is only now about to begin. The Queen has sent a message to the Guild, asking all its members to voyage to the corners of the realm, creating new villages, establishing trading posts, and discovering new towers along the way. Perform these tasks and earn yourself coin – the Guild member who earns the most coins will surely impress the Queen! Strategize your route wisely, as you are not the only adventurer who has answered the call.

Disclaimer: We were provided with a copy of this game for the purposes of this review. What you see pictured is a finalized production copy of the game, and is what you would get in a copy from your FLGS. -L

The Guild of Merchant Explorers is a game of exploration and network building in which players are ultimately trying to amass the most coins. Played over 4 rounds (called Eras), players will be placing Explorers (cubes) onto their corresponding Maps in attempts to create Villages, establish Trading Posts, stumble upon Discovery Towers, or even come across Ruins full of treasure! To setup for a game, each player receives a Map board (all players use the same map in a game) as well as a set of Village Tokens and Explorer Cubes in their chosen color. The Exploration Board is placed in the middle of the table, with the II, III, and I/II/III Era Cards on their corresponding spots.

Create the Exploration Deck by shuffling the Basic Explore Cards and the Era I card, and set it to the side of the board. Shuffle the Investigate and Treasure cards separately, and place those decks face-down near the board as well. Set out the Discovery Tower/Trading Post/Treasure Tokens within reach of all players, and place all the coins in pile as well. Randomly draw 3 Goal Cards for your corresponding map, and place them face-up within view of all players. The remaining Goal Cards are returned to the box. Choose a starting player, and you are ready to begin! The start of a game should look like the picture below.

Every Map board consists of various elements that I’ll touch on quickly here before diving into the gameplay. There are 4 different types of Terrain – Grassland, Desert, Mountain, and Sea. The Capitol City is in the center of the Map, and that is where you start in the first Era. Some spaces have Coins on them, and when you Explore one of those spaces, you immediately earn the listed amount of Coins. Ruins spaces allow you to draw Treasure cards, Discovery Tower spaces earn you extra coins, and City spaces allow you to create Trading Posts. Blank spaces on your Map do not earn you any bonuses. Ok, now onto the gameplay.

Each Era (round) of the game is played over a series of turns in which players will be playing simultaneously. Every turn, a player will reveal the top card of the Exploration Deck, placing it onto the Exploration Board. The card that is revealed dictates how each player must play this turn. If a Basic Exploration Card is revealed, players will place Explorers onto their Map according to the action on the card, and following the placement rules. When placing Explorers, they must always be adjacent to one of your Villages, the Capitol City, or one of your already-placed Explorers. Explorers are placed on your Map one at a time, and you resolve any space actions as you go. The Basic Exploration Cards are standard, and only allow players to place a few Explorers on a few spaces, with no extra bonuses.

If an Era card is revealed from the Exploration Deck, players will perform their corresponding Era action. The first time an Era card is revealed, all players will draw 2 Investigate Cards, choose one to keep, and return the other to the bottom of the deck. They place their chosen Investigate Card next to their Map, and may immediately perform the listed action. Investigate cards are powerful as they allow players to perform more advanced actions each round, beyond just the simple placements of the Basic Exploration Cards. For example, one Investigate Card allows you to ‘Explore any number of connected sea spaces in a straight line.’ This is powerful as it allows you to extend your reach across the map faster than before! That’s just a small taste of how advanced the Investigate Cards can be.

At any point in an Era, when you have completely explored a region (contiguous area of terrain type, excluding sea spaces), you can place a Village. Remove one Explorer cube from the corresponding region, and replace it with a Village token. Villages will earn you coins when you build them, and can be used in future Eras as starting spaces for Explorers. So the more Villages you get around the realm, the more options you have in later rounds for Explorer placement. When you are able to connect 2 City Spaces on your map with an unbroken line of Explorers/Villages, you are able to create a Trading Post. Earn coins for the Trading Post, and place a Trading Post Token on one of the two City Spaces. You may not use Cities with Trading Posts to create more Trading Posts, so strategize about where you want those Tokens to end up on your Map.

When you explore a Discovery Tower space, immediately remove the corresponding Explorer and replace it with a Discovery Tower token. You earn coins for Discovery Towers, but they have no further use once you have explored those spaces. If you explore a Ruins space, place a Treasure token on the space and immediately draw a Treasure Card. Most Treasure Cards have immediate actions (like placing an extra Explorer), but some are saved for end-game scoring. Although you can explore Ruin spaces again in future Eras, you don’t get to draw additional Treasure cards for doing so. Throughout the game, keep an eye on the Goal Cards in play as well. When you have met the requirements of a Goal Card, place an Explorer cube on it, and earn coins accordingly. If you are the first to complete a Goal, you earn more coins than players who complete it later in the game. You can complete all 3 Goal Cards in play, but can only complete each one once during a game.

Each Era continues in this fashion, drawing from the Exploration Deck and performing the listed actions, until the Exploration Deck runs out. That signals the end of the Era. Players remove all Explorer cubes from their Maps, leaving any Villages, Trading Posts, Treasure Tokens, or Discovery Towers. Take the Era card from the Exploration Board for the next Era (Era card II for the second round, etc.) and shuffle it into the deck of Exploration Cards. A new Era is ready to begin. After a total of 4 Eras, players count up their coins, taking into account any end-game Treasure cards, and the player with the most coins is the winner!

I know that may seem like a lot, but I promise the gameplay is pretty straight-forward and intuitive once you get playing. There are just a lot of elements to keep in mind, and that makes the game seem overly complicated at first. There are really only 5 different things at play: Goal cards, Villages, Trading Posts, Ruins, and Discovery Towers. The end-game goal is to end up with the most coins, and how you go about that is up to you. Maybe you want to focus solely on reaching those Discovery Towers, as they earn you big coin the more you have. Or maybe you are on a mission for Treasure cards. Or maybe you want to try to focus on all 5 at once, and put a little bit towards each every round. I think that was my big misstep my first game – I felt like I had to try to accomplish all 5 things, and that is what overwhelmed me. This is definitely a game of strategy, and I was not using my brain successfully. Now that I’ve realized it, my later plays have gone much smoother, and are more fruitful, and I have figured out how to hone my strategy. That being said, I have yet to find one strategy that trumps all, and I’ll keep exploring my options until I find one that’s a sure winner.

One really cool thing I like about this game is that all players have the same Map, but since everyone is going to play with a different strategy in mind, the Maps all look vastly different at the end of the game. It’s just neat to see how people perform the same actions in different ways, and how that results in such arrayed Maps. It’s just a fun tidbit that has no bearing on the game, but is just neat to see. To touch briefly on components – AEG has another high quality game here. The cards and Maps are nice and sturdy, the cardboard components are thick, and the wooden tokens are chunky. The rulebook is clear and concise, the artwork is unique and thematic, and it just looks and feels like a great game. All in all, excellent quality overall.

At first, I wasn’t sure if The Guild of Merchant Explorers was a bit too complicated, but after getting lots of plays under my belt, I can attest that it is not really that complicated at all. It’s all strategy, and how you strategize is up to you. So I guess it could be pretty complicated, depending on what strategy you choose to employ. But overall, the gameplay is logical and intuitive, and it keeps you thinking the whole time. As you can see from our ratings, Travis and I both think this game is pretty great. Not quite in our Top 10’s yet, but it could make its way up there eventually. If you’re looking for a game with great strategic options, cool theming, quality components, and overall just fun to play, I would highly recommend The Guild of Merchant Explorers. Even if you’re on the fence, I’d still say to give it a shot. It might surprise you. And with that, Purple Phoenix Games gives it a strong 10 / 12. Pick up a copy at your FLGS today!