Merchants Cove Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Merchant's Cove, an asymmetrical board game where players are each doing their own thing to try and earn the most points. In this euro game each player has a unique job with the goal to make goods to sell to arriving adventures.

When I look back on my life and career, I am often filled with regret. Missed opportunities, poor choices, and paths untraveled. It all stems from an early decision I made to pursue writing as my ultimate goal. Knowing what I know now I would have gone in a different direction. I would have become a blacksmith. Or maybe an alchemist. Or trained to be the captain of a fleet of fishing vessels. Or even a time-traveling chronomancer, which would have given me the ability to go back in time and pick something else if that career didn’t pan out. If only there was a way for me to give all these disparate gigs a shot.

But wait! There’s a game that lets you try a different one of these jobs each time you play! Carl Van Ostrand, Johnny Pac, and Drake Villareal have designed Merchants Cove, which lets its players take four very different career paths in order to become the most successful specialized merchant. Are any of these jobs better than being a writer? Let’s find out together!

I’m going to attempt to be as brief as possible about how Merchants Cove plays. The game isn’t terribly complicated, but each of the characters uses different mechanisms.

The main board has information that is shared by all the players. The most important information is contained on the boats that will unload Adventurers onto sale piers once they reach their maximum capacity. Each pier has different restrictions for what can be sold there (large goods, small goods, and a Black Market where anything can be sold but