Contents
The problems of the traveling merchant. The challenge of finding the most efficient
route alone is non-trivial, as early computer scientists discovered. But that's not all.
There are questions of availability/demand, of price, of bunions.
One of the earliest and most important trade routes was the Silk Road, actually a
network of routes and locations connecting the Far East and Mediterranean. Its traders
carried a lot more commodities than just silk and a lot more than just commodities.
Along with their wares the traders brought knowledge, ideas, teachings and technologies.
Even board games like Chess were disseminated along it.
In human history trade has been far more important than war yet you would never know
by the number of games devoted to each.
How has the traveling merchant been treated in games? Have any provided a really true
portrayal of the through-trading experience? Is this even a good idea?
The world of games has seen quite a few
different takes on the traveling merchant experience. In modern
times the first contender is Railway Rivals (1973). Played
in two halves, the first is occupied with constructing railroad
tracks between cities, the second with being the fastest to make
a delivery between two randomly-determined city pairs. Because of
the restricted nature of the trading and the emphasis on linking
rather than through-trade, this linking game is excluded
from further consideration. The same goes for other linking efforts
such as the Lancashire Railways series (thus also New
England Railways, Volldampf and Age of Steam), Silverton,
James Clavell's Tai-Pan, Ostindien Company, Sindbad, TRAiNSPORT:
Austria, TRAiNSPORT: Switzerland and others.
Training for a Contract
But this early linking game seems to have inspired others which are in the category including
Boxcars in the very next year. This self-published venture was bought out by
Avalon Hill and re-published with a few changes in 1977 as Rail Baron.
Actually, it may well have had an ancestor from all the way back in 1890 as this
history suggests, for the tracks
are not drawn, but acquired. Rather, players make routing decisions as it is required
to travel to a more or less randomly determined city, attempting to minimize time and,
especially, costs. This type of system, very popular over the years,
will be called the contract class of merchant games. Its
popularity probably stems from its usefulness in terms of motivating
player activities. It's not necessary to ponder the entire network
of sites and options. The contracts make it extremely clear what
must be done. This particular game is rather too long, fiddly and analytical
for most to enjoy today, but it holds an important historical place inspiring what
came later.
Six years later there appeared another railroader, the famous
Empire Builder (1980), which seems to have found a parent
in both Railway Rivals and Rail Baron. This game in
turn has been spun off many times including British Rails,
Eurorails, Nippon Rails, Australian Rails, Iron Dragon, India
Rails, Lunar Rails and Uncle Happy's Train Game. In this
series players are once again drawing tracks between cities, but
this activity is now combined in with Rail Baron's with
travel decisions as the player delivers goods to and from specific
cities at prices fixed by randomly-drawn contract cards. One
innovation is that each card offers three choices, rather than just
the one, but player decisions are still relatively constrained in
that only a few different trade opportunities may be contemplated
at any one time. But the variety of contracts usually generates
challenging dilemmas – which contract should be solved first? what
is the most efficient path? – which players enjoy solving.
In all merchant games players tend to travel and trade, trade and travel, and it is hoped, earn something along the way.
But to keep the experience fresh, to make the challenges new, it is important that even during the game the parameters change
in some way.
Otherwise it can quickly feel repetitive.
There are two main ways of addressing this: (1) random events, which not being particular to merchant games will not be
considered here; and (2) re-investment.
In other words, can earnings be intelligently spent to either improve capability and/or
enhance victory in some other sub-game?
In the
Empire Builder
system investment of earnings is fairly limited.
All that can really be done is construct more track and improve the train's speed and carrying capacity.
But it's possible to get away with this because so much player attention is taken up with drawing track and because of the wide
variety of contract possibilities.
The other important issue in a merchant game is a very vital one: its ending.
Many types of games have a natural thematic conclusion.
Chess ends when the king has been doomed.
A war game ends when the enemy has been rendered powerless.
A race game ends when a player crosses the finish line.
But a traveling merchant setting usually does not offer such an
intuitive victory condition. Sure the merchants compete, but it's
far from clear whether most merchant worlds ever have any kind of
consensus winner. Everyone trades, earns money and no doubt achieves
some personal goals, but a game really needs an ending and a winner.
How shall it be decided who wins, and when?
This aspect was not really satisfactorily solved by the
Empire Builder
system.
Play simply continues until someone connects the most of the major cities and reaches a magic number of cash earned.
But why that number? It is clearly there because it provides a game of the right length, but there can be no thematic explanation.
As will be seen, later merchant games came up with more enjoyable
solutions to this problem.
Translating Trains to Highways and Outer Space
Continuing with the games of the contract type,
seven years later Wolfgang Kramer's
Auf Achse (On the Move)
transported the idea to European trucking.
The highways are naturally pre-drawn, but the movement rate is no longer fixed, instead being variably determined by die roll.
The chief innovation however is in the contracts system.
Recognizing that the modern era offers the possibility of perfect information, contracts are no longer simply assigned, but instead
auctioned off. This tends to act as a corrective for the luck of the draw problems that afflict many contract games.
In effect the players participate in setting the contract values.
This is also the main arena for re-investment, the purchase of extra capacity in the form of trailers being the only other.
Victory is once again based on having the most cash on hand when the demand cards run out.
Changing setting again, a science fiction entry arrived from Steve Jackson Games in the same year:
Star Traders.
The system here is thrown even more wide open than in
Auf Achse
as not only are all contracts accessible to all, they never have any assigned owners until delivered.
Players compete constantly for all of the same contracts.
Each once again has only a single vehicle which travels over pre-drawn "tracks".
At first glance this seems an odd idea in a space game,
but the various paths represent jumps through hyper-space of various distances, which leads to the game's most innovative feature:
before a ship can move, it must roll a certain number of die pips or the move doesn't happen at all.
Clearly luck plays a major role in this, but usually the player has enough movement choices that it becomes a challenging risk-management problem.
In addition, the risk lessens as players invest their profits in bases which make their systems automatic jump destinations.
Players can also invest in extra engines to raise the number of jump attempts per turn from three to six.
But it's investing in bases that provide generate Prestige Points.
Amassing enough of them gives the right to petition for an Imperial Mission, completion of which wins the game.
Beyond competing over demands, players may affect one another via event cards as well
as negotiate the use of others' bases.
Incidental to this discussion, but a point in the game's favor is that each player has a unique power.
With its more satisfying thematic ending and the ability to directly compete with opponents, this is one of the better contracts
games ever devised, a fact insufficiently appreciated over the years.
Going to Sea, Getting Medieval and Gandy Dancing
In the next year Avalon Hill produced the promotional game
Spices of the World.
Cast in a disappointingly vague setting that includes, for example, both San Francisco and Amerigo Vespucci,
it features contracts which specify spice deliveries, but placed at random.
The payoff is according to the value of the spice delivered causing major balance problems since the length of the delivery route is in
no way factored into the payoff.
Perhaps in compensation, the ability to affect others is noticeably present.
Not only are there races to complete the same demand, but landing on another by exact count permits theft of one of the two
spices which can be carried.
This is rendered unpredictable by the movement system – a player decides whether
to roll one die or two.
There is no ability to re-invest; the winner is the first to achieve a set number of points in deliveries.
Probably because of its high degree of randomness and lack of historical connection, the game has not proved popular over the years,
practically the only fans being those who relish the ability to maliciously pirate their fellows.
Four years later the
Empire Builder
ideas were more faithfully preserved in another outing, even though all of the track, trains and even the land were removed.
That would be the merchant marine game,
Distant Seas,
where there are no tracks to draw, but also features contracts. The added wrinkle is that
each specifies a particular type of ship to carry the load.
Profits are thus put into buying additional ships and by the end a player typically has multiple vessels traversing the seven seas.
Once again victory is based on amassing the most funds.
In 1994
Doris&Frank
published
Fugger, Welser, Medici,
a game of medieval merchants.
(By the way, the later German game
Medieval Merchant
is not a traveling merchant, but purely a linking game.)
This contract game features some unusual wrinkles.
Chief among them is that trade revolves around a "casting call" system in which demands or sales are announced for a fixed future date and
location.
If any of the player's three traders are present at the appointed time, he may participate in its blind auction.
This permits players to dramatically affect their opponents, but arrivals are hardly automatic since moving faster costs money and
risks accidents, during which goods are lost.
This movement system is one of the most detailed presented in any traveling merchant game.
The game comes in several versions, the simplest being determined by the player having the most money when the last demand is claimed.
Before this point there is no outlet for investment apart from re-hiring lost traders and countering events.
But more thematically-satisfying variants are provided.
These involve special demand cards associated with the nobility of the period.
Each provides the chance to gamble on improving one's position on a road to the aristrocracy.
While the scheduled nature of the proceedings is a good solution to the imbalances of the contract system,
there is a price to be paid: extremely long games.
Pacific Northwest Rails
is another railroad game in the
Empire Builder
tradition, albeit only coming along in 1998.
In the interim it occurred to many that a lot of track-building looked the same from game to game.
In fact, this is sort of the "lesson" of
Railway Rivals.
The topography of the situation one is supposed to dictate the most efficient track layouts, even to help explain why the real life
ones were developed the way they were. Thus, many games such as
Auf Achse
and this one decided to pre-draw the tracks, focusing player attention on other challenges, here, the movement.
Now the right to use a track no longer belongs exclusively to the person who paid to draw it, but to anyone able to buy a share in it.
These shares are part of a shares market, itself becoming a major facet of play decisionmaking and opportunity for players to
re-invest their earnings. But once again victory is dependent on acquisition of the most value in cash and shares.
To Hell and Back Again
From this unusual system consider the unique theme of transporting
souls to the various levels of hell, by railroad.
The
HellRail
game first published in 1999, is completely opposite
Star Traders
in its treatment of contracts.
Not only are they not open, they aren't even known until a player
is at the right location and chooses to reveal them.
At this point the demand is known, but is exclusively assigned to
its owner for completion.
Although, a few contracts are treated in just this way in
Auf Achse,
this seems to be the only case where every contract is treated in this way.
On the other hand, there are more chances to affects others as the
tracks, represented by the same types of cards as the contracts,
are placed and removed to form an ever-changing board.
Movement is also conducted by these selfsame cards, contributing
further unpredictability.
As there are no profits – only points – there is no re-investment
and the game ends too quickly to harvest the fruits of it anyway.
Victory is again achieved rather undramatically, i.e. by whoever
has the most points when the cards run out.
But then this unusual game's exclusive, hidden contracts nearly
stretch the game out of the merchant genre entirely.
A very different hidden contracts effort is the German
Bohn Hansa (Bean Trader in its American edition).
The topic of buying and selling beans among some of the cities of the Hanseatic League
is frivolous, but does achieve the pun of the title.
The historically-minded can mentally substitute cash commodities for these eight
subsistence products. This contract system follows in the wake of
Fugger, Welser, Medici,
in the use of expiring contracts. The difference is that the contract cards
are entirely private, remaining in the player's hand from announcement
until just before fulfillment. These cards are kept with other hand cards in a strict
order. One is played (being later recovered) for each move a player makes. When a
contract appears, the player must have the requisite beans at the right place to gain
the reward or the contract is lost. This restrictive situation is rescued by special
negotiation rules which permit another to essentially teleport – playing a single
card to move over many areas – if invited in by another player wanting to make a
bean deal. Deals can be difficult to achieve since each player has room for only eight
bean loads, but it is somewhat relieved by the reality that contracts give players rather
different needs. In fact, direct inter-player trading, although it seems even more could
have been done with it, works better here than in just about any other merchant game
apart from examples like
Caravansérail
where it is the heart of activity.
Novel mechanisms are also working on the supply side. Products appear in different
mixes at each city via card draw. With a nice elegance, each new appearance is placed
on a higher position on a rising scale, automatically elucidating the higher price.
As items are bought up, the price decreases are similarly indicated. It is generous too
that a player can decide from which rung of the ladder to buy as their differing
quantitites mean that the decision may or may not cause prices to lower. This is
probably more "game-y" than realistic, but so unobtrusive that none should complain.
Apart from buying new beans there is no opportunity for re-investment, but as the
player is so consumed with the difficult problem of the expiring contracts, the lack
is usually not apparent. The end of game conditions – running out of contracts –
is as uninspiring as the rest is innovative. Unfortunately, that old problem of
many a contract game – that one may with luck draw a contract which one can fill
all too easily – also applies here, and is even exacerbated by the small number
of them actually processed.
A French entry in the contracts mode is
Marchands d'Empire (Merchants of the Empire).
The setting seems to be medieval-fictional.
Players travel from city to city under pre-programmed orders.
This is elegantly handled and prefect for the era in which merchants
would not know the whereabouts and activities of their competitors.
Less thematic are the unlimited carrying capacities; even large
ones are entirely cost-free.
Also problematic are the monopoly points awarded every three turns.
While it makes sense that a merchant would be able to earn extra
profits by cornering a commodity, here all that's necessary is a
simple
majority. In effect, it's more of a game mechanism reward for those
who have fallen too far behind fulfilling contracts.
A third thematic problem is that a player may only collect one
commodity in a city per turn and only the lowest-valued one at
that.
As far as contracts are concerned, just like the commodities, they
are awarded on a first come-first served basis.
Their placement is random, although somewhat predictable. This
works as follows. Cities are numbered 1 to 20. The location of a
new
contract is rolled on a twenty-sided die, but if a location is already occupied by a contract or commodity, the next higher numbered
city is considered until a vacant one is found.
New commodities for collection appear in the same way.
Both placements can be unfair as their commercial values are fixed
and only take a number of items, not distance to deliver, into
account.
Deliveries lead to one of the best features of the game. While
there is no re-investment per se, each fulfilled contract grants
two
opportunities: (1) the contract may be kept as a commercial reward;
(2) if no temple is present, one may be placed to represent church
influence; (3) political influence markers may be placed in the surrounding countryside.
Mercantile, religious and political power having been accounted
for, victory is accorded, after a set number of turns, to whoever
has
has accomplished the most in the combination of those areas. This
whole subsystem provides one of the more thematic and challenging
endings available.
Beyond Contracts
Having delivered up all of the contract games, it's time to examine
those that dared to go beyond this constraint.
Avalon Hill in 1988, in addition to
Spices of the World,
published Merchant of Venus.
They must have been obsessed with spice that year in Baltimore as
this science fiction setting apparently replaced an original one of historic trading in the Spice Islands.
The chance to depict fantastical alien races was no doubt a savvy marketing decision, but as will be seen, served to enhance play as well.
Here inventor Richard Hamblen and publisher Avalon Hill moved beyond the usual contract system and create a true through-trading situation.
Each location produces a unique commodity and demands only a few different ones.
Players travel around buying and selling at whim, often seeking a profitable loop to exploit.
Placed in front of this main game there is an exploration sub-game during which the locations of the various products and demands are
established.
This is the area in which setting can really leaven the process.
Were it historical, the products would be in the same positions
for every playing, but the science fiction approach permits random
placement which meakes every game a fresh problem to solve.
It can also cause imbalance if a player can luck into a lucrative route before others.
This effect can be exacerbated for the player who turns up too many misfortunes during exploration.
As in some of the predecessors, profits can be used to improve the ship in speed and capacity.
It is also possible to purchase factories – probably shops in the original – representing a local investment that generates more profit.
Victory is once again achieved with the most money and unless players use the optional combat rules – rather drastic – it is difficult
to do much of anything to slow down a leader.
A nautically-oriented game that kept its theme intact is 1992's
High Seas.
The sea this time is that of the Caribbean of the seventeenth century.
Players sail their ships from island to island, buying and selling at each.
Availability and price of wares depend on tables which take into account a lot
of factors about the port, such as its size, economic level, whether it is a
source or market for the item and how much of the supply has has previously been
bought up. Selling prices and quantities are determined just as realistically.
In terms of logistics, players begin with just two small ships so cargo space is limited,
as is movement since vagaries of the winds may work counter to a player's plans.
Re-investment is available in the form of more and larger ships. It might also be a
good idea to invest in some cannon and ammunition since this is a war game with plenty
of score for pirating and battle. Obviously this is the primary approach to stopping
a leading player. Those activities genreate infamy points as well, which combined with
gold earned, become the victory points by which the win is judged after a set number of
turns. Impressively getting all the history right, this game has only one problem:
it does far too much of it. There is just so much table consultation, arithmetic
calculation and waiting around while others do it that all the fun falls out.
Thus it ultimately fails as the ideal merchant game, but to its credit, fails in a way
completely different than any other to date.
Item for Item
Die Hanse
was a German release just one year later.
The topic is once again sea trade, this time among the port cities of the
Hanseatic League, but no money ever changes hands.
Instead, as players sail around the Baltic and North Seas, they merely trade items with the port on a 1-for-1 basis, each port having
particular items it wishes to buy and sell.
The goal is not so much to earn profits, but to be the first to bring back a specific set of items (although each does have a hidden value).
This ending feels even more "game-y" than the usual "earn the most money" but it's in the implementation of movement that the game is the
most singular of any discussed here, and many others besides.
The thematic idea is that player represent merchants with insufficient funds for an entire ship.
Thus they pool funds with the player to the left and jointly control a single ship.
And, in an another admission that it is a game, they they also control half of the ship of the player to their right.
Thus not only must the most efficient route be determined, it's necessary to reach an agreement with a player who may be one's
chief rival and who in fact may need to travel in the completely opposite direction.
Or maybe he wants to just because his partner is about to win the game.
Usually it leads to some kind of "situation" at least once per playing.
In fact this unusual setup really turns this into something much
different than a traveling merchant game.
A similar trading system is found in Bruno Faidutti's
Caravansérail.
Once again a hidden formula must be satisfied and once again items are traded directly
instead of being bought and sold. But trade is directly with other players rather than
ports and instead of the watery seas, the environment is Arabia's sandy wastes.
A difference is that movement is pre-programmed, perhaps influencing the later
Marchands d'Empire.
As in
Die Hanse
there is also a certain amount of raiding to go along with the
trading so it is possible to interfere with other players, but the hidden nature
of the proceedings make it hard to tell just who the leader might be. Without
financial earnings, there is no differentiation between the various commodities
and not even very much idea which way to travel except by what can be gleaned from
negotiation or overheard negotiation. This activity, as well as sudden raiding strikes,
is more the meaning of the game than are travel and trade.
All God's Merchants Got Guns
Another French entry,
Serenissima,
transfers the action back to the water, this time the warmer clime of the Renaissance
Mediterranean. A juicy dilemma makes capacity and movement speed trade off against one
another as the more sailors there are to provide movement, the less space available
for commodities. As for commodities, each port produces a different type which can
then be consumed by any other port, so long as it doesn't already have one. This is a
fairly nice, though severe, representation of the reality that a scarce import has
great value. The other trade rule, that the price paid for a commodity decreases as
more of any type come in, is less defensible, but it could apply in some situations.
Re-investment is available in the form of more ships and also port fortifications.
Yes, fortifications because this
is also a wargame in which players may attack one another. Obviously there is plenty of
opportunity to catch up with others, in fact too much. The military aspects end up
so dominating that it really becomes more about this than a traveling merchant game.
The proof is that if the military activities are simply omitted, the game becomes
processional and uninteresting. The ending of this peculiar hybrid curiously goes back
to the merchant idea, ending after a set number of turns with monetary advantage
giving the victory.
Back to the Bazaar
Three years later the famed American designer Sid Sackson and German publisher Abacus
released
Samarkand.
This was a re-working of the twice-published Bazaar which being a static game
of trade without travel is not considered here. But Samarkand players do travel,
the oases, deserts and bazaars of Central Asia being their way stations.
Actually none of the locations are named so the historico-geographical connection is
rather slight. As in
Die Hanse trading is item for item and conducted with neutral spaces on the board.
It is also possible to purchase items at random. There is no hard limit on carrying
capacity although when they run out everyone must discard to get down to twelve.
Movement is one space per turn which means that players have more the feeling of
reacting to the board than of traveling to definite destinations. To escape this
somewhat it is possible to pay a small fee and roll the die to move, but as all pips
must be used this is very unpredictable. It can be successful however for outpacing
others and possibly interfering with their plans. On the other hand, a
curious set of rules usually makes it preferable to travel behind others.
Unlike the historical situation of the Silk Road, where profits were usually 200% or more,
in the game they tend to be small. This makes it vital to be present at nomad camps
when they fill up as this allows taking the entire holding for a nominal fee.
As the camps charge each visitor an item fee, being a late visitor is ideal, a rather
unintuitive idea for a merchant game as it runs directly counter to the usual one of
first-to-market.
In terms of the actual markets, being first is a good idea as immediately after a sale
they buy at reduced rate until a sale has occurred elsewhere. As each commodity type
can be sold at a single location, this can be serious, especially since it is vital to
sell at the highest price, so constrained are the economics. This optimal price is
achieved in an unusual way: by selling a very high number of items. Typically one
diminishing returns are expected as supply increases, but maybe this is supposed to
reflect a near-monopoly situation.
There is no real re-investment – indeed a lot of funds are needed just to acquire
trade goods. While victory again goes to the player achieving a magic amount of cash,
the play process remains interesting because of the
continually-changing nature of the board.
The expansion Isfahan variant adds even more board variability:
after each sale the market no longer reduces its price. Instead it picks up stakes
and moves to another part of the board. This doesn't seem exactly historical either,
but does sever the increase the ability to affect others even more.
A Fairy Tale Ending
A similar idea is found in one of the markets of Friedemann Friese's
Fische Fluppen Frikadellen
(Fish, Cigarettes, Meatballs). Eschewing the easy cliches of historical setting
in favor of a fictional, urban one, the game has players travel about at fixed rates,
trading in any of five commodities. Eleven different markets offer various
specialties, e.g. buying, selling or exchanging 2-for-1. Prices do not differ from
location to location, but are constant across the board, changing after
a sale or as a side effect of interactions with certain markets. These
changes tend to come rather quickly and since supplies are scarce, there
is a very tactical ability to interfere with the plans of others. This
helps with freshness almost as much as does the fact that the markets used
and their placements are random from game to game. This latter advantage
it seems, will always be a problem to overcome for historical treatments.
There is a fixed carrying capacity of seven, not including the
fetishes, the collection of three of which provides the victory. There is
no re-investment apart from acquiring more wares, although each fetish
purchased grants a special ability token. According to the storyline,
three fetishes permit the winner to marry a fairytale princess, but
this theme is hardly reflected by the modern hard edge of the rest of
the game. A fetish is gained by turning in a specific combination of
commodities at the twelfth market, that of the fetish dealer. Faithfully
reflecting a through-trading system very elegantly, as well as providing
a more satisfying ending, Fische Fluppen Frikadellen succeeds as
one of the more satisfying, albeit non-historical, merchant games to date.
Back to the Baltic
The former Hanseatic trade of the Baltic Sea makes for a useful topic and
in its second outing (after Die Hanse)
Andreas Steding has taken appropriate advantage in his new game Kogge.
The first difference one detects from the usual merchant game is
that adjacencies change all the time. While we saw a bit of this in
Fische Fluppen Frikadellen,
here it is ubiquitous and profound; in fact it's often possible that from a
given point A it's impossible to get to B. Moreover, these changing trade routes
are controlled by the players who change out the directional chits that only they
know. The rationale for this in an historical game is questionable, but as the
instructions point out, factors like thieves, disagreements, tolls, silted harbors
storms, pirates, war and malevolent officials often prevented traders from traveling
exactly where they intended.
The second difference one notices is how tightly everything is integrated.
These same chits are also used in a
Poker-like
auction system that determines turn order and the chits have the side effect
of producing goods for trade in each of their corresponding cities. But we're
not yet done with all the uses of chits as they may also be spent to get extra
moves, to buy a raid opportunity from the guild master or to get a good.
Goods on the other hand, besides being traded for other goods, can be used to
buy chits, trade offices and even better special advantages.
Notice that no mention has yet been made of money and, perhaps surprisingly in
a merchant game, it does not feature. The need for it is obviated by some innovative
victory conditions, two sets of them in fact.
One involves purchase of five trade offices in which case the
game ends immediately, but in a four-player playing this is a difficult road which
often involves weakening one's position as the offices are both expensive and lower one's
chances for the timed ending. The second is based on victory points granted mostly
for purchased special advantages and goods holdings.
These special abilities permit the players to break the usual rules and represent
a useful re-investment of trading success. The possible advantages, all of which are
available to at most two players, are (1) trading efficiency: the ability to get three
goods for one rather than the usual two; (2) chit flexibility: one free chit per turn,
randomly drawn; (3) cheaper movement: two free moves per turn rather than the usual one;
(4) better access to the guild master who sells special advantages: ability to travel
to him from anywhere by paying one item.
Which of these advantages is best is far from clear and players will probably enjoy
experimenting.
Finally, catching up to a leader is possible in multiple ways. A main one is that a
player has up to two chances to raid, either a city or another player. When a player is
raided, the victim divides his goods holdings in two and the raider chooses the set he
likes. But in addition, players can outbid one another to reach a destination first and
grab the goods before another as well as grab and or hoard markers. Bidding to be the
one to decide how far the guild master moves can also be decisive. Finally, for players
who really want it there are optional rules for conflict.
Another Imaginary World
Logistico is a second game from Essen 2003 to put through what
by now has become the traveling merchant game evaluation checklist:
Koplopers & Dwarsliggers
Koplopers & Dwarsliggers is a 2009 game from The Netherlands:
Also ...
Title Year Inventor(s) Publisher Type Across the Continent 1890 unknown unknown contract Bazaar 1967 Sid Sackson 3M static Railway Rivals 1973 David Watts Rostherne linking Boxcars (Rail Baron) 1974 R.S. & Thomas F. Erickson, Jr. self contract Empire Builder 1980 Darwin Bromley Mayfair contract Samarcanda 198? (unknown) International Team (unplayed) Star Trader 1982 Nick Karp, Redmond Simonsen SPI (unplayed) British Rails 1984 E. Henninger, J. Griffin, J.&B. Roznai Mayfair contract Bus Boss 1985 David Watts Rostherne (unplayed) Auf Achse 1987 Wolfgang Kramer FX Schmid contract Star Traders 1987 David Ladyman Steve Jackson contract James Clavell's Tai-Pan 1987 I. Bailey, Albie Fiore FASA linking Merchant of Venus 1988 Richard Hamblen Avalon Hill merchant Spices of the World 1988 Rex A. Martin Avalon Hill contract Eurorails 1990 Darwin Bromley Mayfair contract Sindbad 1990 Jean Vanaise Flying Turtle linking Agent of Change 1991 Darwin Bromley Huntington Museum of Art contract Silverton 1991 Philip J. Smith Two Wolf linking High Seas 1992 Douglas Setser, Nathan Wagner DSRG merchant Nippon Rails 1992 Larry & Joe Roznai Mayfair contract Distant Seas 1992 Vernon Paul Rood (self) contract Die Hanse 1993 Tom Schoeps Laurin negotiation Uncle Happy's Train Game 1993 Darwin Bromley Mayfair contract Fugger, Welser, Medici 1994 Doris & Frank Frank Nestel, Doris Matthäus contract Australian Rails 1994 Larry Roznai Mayfair contract Caravansérail 1996 Bruno Faidutti (WWW) negotiation Serenissima 1996 Dominique Erhard, Duccio Vitale Descartes Editeur wargame Iron Dragon 1996 Tom Wham, Darwin Bromley Mayfair contract Ostindien Company 1996 Jean Vanaise Piatnik linking Trainsport: Austria 1996 Franz Bayer, Thomas Hüttner Winsome linking Trainsport: Switzerland 1997 Franz Bayer, Thomas Hüttner Winsome linking Pacific Northwest Rails 1998 Robert Carlsen Gandy Dancer contract Lancashire Railways 1998 Martin Wallace Winsome linking Medieval Merchant 1998 Christwart Conrad Goldsieber linking Samarkand 1999 Sid Sackson Abacus merchant Isfahan 1999 Sid Sackson Abacus merchant India Rails 1999 Bill Fawcett Mayfair contract Prairie Railroads 1999 Martin Wallace Winsome (unplayed) New England Railways 2000 Martin Wallace Winsome linking Train Raider 2000 Megumi Tsuge Yanoman (unplayed) Volldampf 2001 Martin Wallace TM-Spiele linking Pampas Railroads 2001 Martin Wallace Winsome (unplayed) Fische Fluppen Frikadellen 2002 Friedemann Friese 2F merchant Bean Trader 2002 Uwe Rosenberg Rio Grande contract Marchands d'Empire 2002 Régis Bonnessée (WWW) contract Age of Steam 2002 Martin Wallace Warfrog/Winsome linking Lunar Rails 2003 M. Robert Stribula Mayfair contract Kogge 2003 Andreas Steding MOD/JKLM merchant Logistico 2003 Corné van Moorsel Cwali contract Koplopers & Dwarsliggers 2009 Chislaine van den Bulk Giuco contract
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