Merchants Cove
with Merchants Cove: The Dragon Rancher
With the recent arrival of the Merchants Cove Big Box, I found myself actually appreciating the design of the box, rather than simply cursing its large size.
The nested box that divides the big box into two chambers is quite elegant, actually.
And, in an attempt to prove its usefulness, I set out to play a game of Merchants Cove. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have the spare time or energy to learn any of the new modules; but I did take the opportunity to try out one of the merchants I’ve had for a while but never played: The Dragon Rancher. You may recall a couple of years ago that I created custom wooden poop tokens for The Dragon Rancher because the person I bought it from had lost 3 of them (I did eventually get replacements from the now-defunct publisher).
The Dragon Rancher uses a mancala adjacency mechanism on its merchant board in both placing food tokens and moving dragons around to eat said food tokens.
And then, when you move a dragon to your market stall, you place a poop token on the grid where the dragon was, which blocks that square until you clear the poop.
The Dragon Rancher is also supposed to feature a bag building mechanism, but in reality there’s very little building to do; over the course of the game, you could possibly add a total of 8 tokens to the bag that starts with 20.
I think action efficiency is also a central concept for (but not unique to) this merchant; it’s best to shovel poop when all 4 poop tokens can be cleaned up at once, since you clear them all for the same amount of time regardless. And the “Eat & Grow” action allows you to create a new dragon, move dragons to grow them, and move dragons to the sales pen an unlimited number of times, as long as each sub-action is legal.
Unfortunately, I randomly chose a Rogue and Townsfolk cards and ended up with a setup that didn’t quite work. My Rogue card was “The Fence”, which mean I only had 1 rogue available in the bag, but one of my townsfolk cards, Underworld, interacted with incoming rogues on the piers – this meant the game ended up being quite low scoring (relatively speaking).
I won, 195 to 126.
And, furthermore, this is probably the best designed “big box” that I can think of. It’s not fiddly and it’s easy, relatively speaking, to retrieve just what you need without having to deal with what you don’t.
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