Most of these are less impactful, small steps forward in the process of producing goods to sell. Production actions typically take two hours (hourglass units of time) to complete, but there are a few one hour actions.
It’s a simple system, but one that I very much enjoy. Any time players share the same space, the player whose token is on top will go first. The player whose time token is the closest to the starting position will be the next one to take their turn. After resolving the action, the active player will advance their cog-wheel shaped time tracker one space forward for each hourglass next to the action they took. Hourglass icons next to each action space on player board indicates how much time said action will take. Player turn order is represented by a clock on the lower portion of the main board. Each shopkeeper’s actions will vary based on the central mechanic it was designed around but the end goal is the same producing small and large goods to sell at the market. During this phase, players will take turns placing their worker on the action spaces on their shopkeeper board and resolving the associated actions. The meat of the game takes place in the Production phase. This prepares the board for the Production and Market Phases. During the Arrival phase, players randomly draw two customer meeples from a draw bag to be placed in each of the six ships. Merchants Cove is played in three rounds of four phases: Arrival, Production, Market, and Clean-Up phases. What makes Merchants Cove so fascinating is its asymmetric nature. Color coded components and vibrant colors make it easy to read the board state and pull the attention of ADD gamers like myself back to the board. For the most part, it’s a fairly straight forward worker placement game where players produce goods to sell to various customers arriving on this island of merchants. In Merchant’s Cove players each take on the role of different shop keepers looking to make a fortune island. Merchants Cove managed to appeal to my thematic needs while providing quite the interesting and crunchy experience. While that’s admittedly my own problem, it kept me from purchasing some top rated games like Brass: Birmingham until after friends forced me to play it. As objectively good as crunchier Euro games are, the common themes lose me pretty quickly. Whether that means there’s an emerging storyline, pre-written narrative, or just something heavily thematic like Cthulhu Wars, I lean toward games that have been deemed “Ameritrash”. I prefer overly thematic games that I can get immersed in. Many euro games center around historic, economic, or agricultural themes and while there’s nothing wrong with any of those, they rarely catch my eye. I’m generally not a big fan of Euro games.
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