Merchants of Andromeda
- Board's Eye View
- 57 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Published by Allplay, Merchants of Andromeda is a scifi updated reskin and reworking of Reiner Knizia's Merchants of Amsterdam, which was first published by Jumbo and Rio Grande Games back in 2000. It's a 'Dutch Auction' game for 3-5 players where the cards offered for sale steadily reduce in price until a player buys them.
With its multiple busy-looking minigame boards, there's a lot more in the Merchants of Andromeda box than you might initially expect. On your turn you draw three cards, one at a time. You must allocate one for its resources, one for its 'influence' (play on one of the mini-game boards), and one to be put up for auction where its winner can take both its resources and influence. The standout feature in the Amsterdam game was the mechanical clock timer that was included for counting down the price of auctions. A quarter century later the technology has moved on: Andromeda doesn't use a mechanical timer but instead points players to the free Allplay app which should be used to run the auctions. With the app running on a smartphone, players all touch their fingers to the screen as the price steadily counts down from 20 to 5. The longer everyone's fingers remain, the cheaper the card gets, but the card is won by the player who is first to remove their finger, and obviously they must pay the amount showing when they took their finger off the screen. If the counter hits 5 before anyone 'bids', then no-one gets that card.
The influence actions vary. There are some that simply give additional advancement on resource tracks but most let you play one of the minigames on the different boards. The space exploration board is a push-your-luck game involving set collection and area majorities. When you place markers on the space station board you're competing to have the largest area of orthogonally adjacent tiles. The Space Invaders board is a dice game where you roll five six-sided dice (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and assign three to the Space Invaders and two to defence: as the invaders descend, they eliminate players' markers but you get to place out a marker when defending, destroying alien spaceships and taking them for scoring. When the influence action shows the voting symbol, you get to post your voting tokens in the ballot boxes for particular policies. These are opened and compared when the voting board is scored. It's the policy that gets the most votes that will be activated, usually upping a future scoring event, but those with votes in the other ballot boxes are compensated with money for their votes. How unlike our Earth-bound democracies.
All through the game, cards will be drawn that advance the tracker on an event board that includes periodic scoring of each of the various minigames. These give payouts to the players in first and second place in the various sections of the board being scored but with higher rewards applied to the areas with the most activity: so, for example, the sector of the space station with the most markers on it will win the player with the largest area of adjacent markers more money than a similar sized area in an otherwise less activated sector. You can expect each minigame to be scored twice during the course of play, plus everything is scored again for a third time at the end of the game.
The multiple busy boards can make Merchants of Andromeda fiddly to set up and a daunting prospect for anyone coming new to the game. Gameplay itself tho' is simple enough and all of the mini-games can be quickly grokked. Each of them is fun to play, but not so much for others to watch: tho' this isn't a game where turns are particularly long, you don't have anything to do while other players are taking their 'influence' minigame action. This isn't a game where you can spend your downtime planning your next turn because you have no way of knowing what cards you will draw. That's not so much a problem if you're playing a three-player game but if you're playing with a full complement of five players and you don't win any of the auctions on other players' turns, you have to wait out eight minigames before you get another chance to play any of them yourself.
