Tricky Traders

No, this isn't another tricksy trick-taking game but it is a card-driven game. Tricky Traders is a two-player game played over three rounds of three turns, representing the morning, noon and evening of three days in a Medieval market town - probably Hamelin because the game features a Pied Piper and a large quantity of rats. The game is designed by Colin Domer, with art by Dennis Lohausen. It's published by Pegasus Spiele and it plays in around 30 minutes.

You lay out the seven market stalls in a circle and initially place a customer and four rat meeples on each stall. There are five special characters: the Market Crier, Steward, Juggler, Saboteur and the Pied Piper, and these are placed out at random on five of the stalls. There's a card for each stall and two are dealt to each player, with the others going back in the box unseen. That way each player has an interest in the fate and prosperity of two stalls but their opponent doesn't know which two... Obviously then there's a deduction element to Tricky Traders, tho' the rules suggest that for your first play you should dispense with that aspect and both play with these cards face up.

Players each have identical hands of 16 cards. The majority of these trigger the movement of one of the characters or a character's action. For each period of the day, the players simultaneously play two of their cards. They are activated in ascending numerical order but if both players play the same card then they cancel each other out and have no effect. The custom six-sided dice for each of the three periods of the day are rolled at the start of a round and they show how far characters move when their movement is triggered. The character effects variously move customers, move other characters or remove rats, and the score for each stall at the end of each round depends on how its customer numbers compare with neighbouring stalls, which characters are on it and how many rats it contains.

So you're using cards to manipulate the meeples but the tricky part is that you aren't trying to get the highest score on your two stalls; you actually score the difference between your two stalls so you want one to score high and the other to score low - preferably a minus score because when you subtract a negative number it becomes positive (for example, 4 minus -2 = 6)... You must decide which stall you're supporting and which you're sabotaging at the end of the first round by placing your face-down stall cards either side of a +/- marker card.

When played with the stall ownership cards concealed, there's scope for misdirection so that it's possible to end up getting accidentally helped by your opponent... In our plays at Board's Eye View we came up with a small house rule to actively reward accurate deduction. Taking a leaf out of the scoring in Scales of Fate (IV Studio), we played with a bonus on offer of two points for correctly guessing your opponent's two stalls. It's an option you might want to try.

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