Animal traders want to be rid of their rubbish
Dale of Merchants
and Dale of Merchants 2
Deck building and deck dismantling
In the town of Dale, up-and-coming merchants of the animal kingdom meet to participate in a competition, the winner of which will be made a member of the famous Tradesmen Guild. In Dale of Merchants, players take up the role of those participants and try to be first to put down the demanded eight stacks of valuable commodities.
This review describes the game of Dale of Merchants, published in 215, as well as the sequel game Dale of Merchants 2, published in 2016. Both games are stand-alone games, but can be combined into one game, too. The both play the same way and only vary in their deck of cards. Both games have been designed by Finnish designer and graphic artist Sami Laakso and were published by his company Snowdale Design.
In the preparation phase of a game you need to begin by selecting a number of animals equal to the number of players plus one. Each animal is represented by a stack of cards. The cards in this stack are thematically connected. Parrot cards allow you to draw cards, and Chameleon cards can copy other cards. Each animal deck comprises cards of values 1 to 5. Each player takes the #1 card of every selected animal for his starting deck. The remaining animal cards are shuffled together for a common draw pile. Five cards from this draw pile are turned up and laid out to form the market. When, during play, a card is taken out of the marked, it is replaced by a new one from the draw pile. When the draw pile is empty, the discard pile is shuffled to form the new draw pile. Finally, players amend their starting deck with rubbish cards until all have ten cards in hand. Those are shuffled as well and form the personal draw pile. From this personal draw pile, you draw five cards for your hand.
The game is played in turn until someone has met the winning condition.
If you are the active player, you can select one of four action options:
1. Buy a card
You can buy the five cards available from the market. The price of a card is paid with cards from your hand. All cards have a value, even rubbish cards, they have a value of 1. Cards that were used go to your personal discard pile.
2. Use a Technique
All animal cards have techniques, which are printed as text on the cards. You can use techniques of cards in your hand. To do so, you play the card and put it on your personal discard pile, when you have resolved it. Most technique cards allow you to resolve an additional action when they have been activated.
3. Set down a stack
Aim of the game is to set down eight stacks of cards. You can use an action to set down a stack, provided the following conditions are met:
a. The first stack must have a value of 1, the second stack a value of 2, the third one a value of 3, and so on to stack eight which must be of value 8.
b. You can only put cards into a stack that you take from your hand
c. You can put any number of cards into a stack, but only cards for animals of one kind.
Cards that have been put into a stack, remain in this stack until the end of the game.
Put any number of cards from your hand onto your own discard pile.
When an action has been implemented, or even several ones, if techniques did allow this, your turn ends, and you replenish your hand from your personal draw pile to five cards.
In a typical game, there is only buying of cards and using of card techniques at the start. Card techniques introduce - as is standard for that kind of game - a lot of variety to the game by manipulating the game mechanics in various ways. Some animal cards also allow you to optimize and clean up your deck, for instance by getting rid of rubbish cards.
Sooner or later, however, the game undergoes a radical change, because now the only purpose is to fastest to set down stacks. A race is developing, in which the drawing of the right cards at the right time is the deciding factor. Of course, you can use card techniques at that stage of the game as well.
This stage of the game is the major difference to all other classic deck building games, as, for instance, Dominion. In Dale of Merchants you first construct your deck and then dismantle it again. More often than not you finish a game with less then five cards in your hand, draw pile and discard pile combined. This results in a thrilling and challenging game dynamic, which sets it nicely apart from from other deck building games.
Game components and the rules are very well done, nicely design and provide an answer to nearly all questions. However, with one or other of the cards you might start to consider how it is really meant to be used. But with a bit of logic, you usually can come up with a feasible interpretation. A more detailed explanation in the rules, however, would not have been amiss for some some of the cards. The cards are also only explained by text, which needs a good command of the English language. Sami Laakso thus does not keep to the trend of the universal card game using symbol language. I suppose that an experiment in this direction would have spectacularly failed in this case.
Dale of Merchants and Dale of Merchants 2 come in compact little boxes, without much empty space and, therefore, are much easier and more comfortable to transport than, for instance, Dominion.
To test the game, one of the versions is easily sufficient. Which one you select is not important, they are equal. Only if you play the game very often you might want to acquire the second game to achieve more variation with new animals and techniques.
Dale of Merchants is, without doubt, a deck building game, and therefore we automatically compare it to Dominion. I was, as so many were, enchanted by Dominion in the beginning. But after countless game, my enthusiasm is somewhat dimmed, as the plays rather similar every time. Dale of Merchant, for me, offers something refreshingly new. All the nice, classic elements of deck building games are present. Due to the additional mechanism of dismantling towards the end, it has that certain something that gives be back the enthusiasm for the genre, at least for some time. Therefore, from me, a clear recommendation to all friends of deck building games who, like me, are looking for an alternative to the well-known classics.
Markus Wawra
Players: 2-4
Age: 10+
Time: 40+
Designer:
Artist: Sami Laakso
Price: Sami Laakso
Publisher: Snowdale Design 2016
Web: snowdaledesign.fi
Genre: Deck building
Users: With friends
Version: en
Rules: cn en es it pl pt
In-game text: yes
Comments:
Classic deck building elements
Additional deck dismantling
Compact box
Attractive components
Compares to:
Dominion and other deck building games
Other editions:
British Games (cn), Devir (es fr pt), Fullcap Games (pl)
My rating: 6
Markus Wawra:
Deck building with all the nice classic elements and on top of that a refreshingly new mechanism - deck dismantling! If you want a change from standard deck building, you should take a look at Dale of Merchants.
Chance (pink): 2
Tactic (turquoise): 1
Strategy (blue): 3
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 1
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 3
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0