PLAYED FOR YOU

Spice Merchant

Saffron, ginger and cinnamon

As a spice merchant in Venice we are meant to earn good money and manipulate the market if necessary, in order to become the richest merchant.

The spice cards are made up from 16 x Black Pepper, 16 x Ginger, 14 x Cinnamon, 14 x Cloves, 12 x Nutmeg and 12 x Saffron. Spice cards in front of a player are his goods for sale, spice cards in the middle of the table are the marked demand.

Each player is dealt 7 of the shuffled spice cards, the rest is stacked. In each of the four rounds you lay out goods for covered trade, and then you have one action in turn, choosing one of two possibilities: Display an open good for sale or put 1-4 cards on one of the 6 market spots in the middle which are marked at the start by six chips. One spice variety can only be present in market twice and there can only be maximum four cards in a market. Finally, you draw cards to hold seven cards again.

When there are cards in all markets ore when two of the markets are complete with four cards each, the round ends and each player reveals his covered trade goods: For each card that you have set aside and for which there is a market you now get one to 10 points depending on the variety and number of cards in this market, but only for one goods card. Two identical cards can only score if there are two markets for this spice.

The double use of cards for market and goods and the difficult choice between influencing the market and to set aside goods are both interesting ideas; but the implementation suffers from the imbalance of the prices - Pepper is only worth half of the saffron value - and the often rather quick and unexpected end of a round.

Players: 3-4

Age: 10+

Time: 20+

Designer: Gun-Hee Kim

Art: not named

Price: on demand

Publisher: Deinko 2012

Web: http://deinko.com

Genre: Card game

Users: With friends

Version: multi

Rules: en kr

In-game text: no

Comments:

Double function of cards

Imbalance of spice card numbers and market prices

Little planning, often ends unexpectedly early

Compares to:

San Juan, Bohnanza and other with double functions for cards

Other editions:

Currently none

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0