Takahe’s Solo Den: Merchants of the Dark Road
Journeys In the Dark euro-style!
I know what you might say… don’t judge a book by its cover… but Merchants of the Dark Road is simply a stunning example of how well-chosen art (by Andrew Bosley who was unknown to me until this game) and representation can “sell” the theme. I was only mildly aware of this game, however, the moment it reached our shores, the cover art, along with a brief but intriguing description, caught my attention. Normally, I wouldn’t really care that much about theme in my euro games, but in this case, it was the theme itself that piqued my interest – sure, the gameplay mechanics spoke to me too… but, looking at the game, I couldn’t resist the calling.
Merchants of the Dark Road is, at its foundations, a rondel-style action selection euro with its heaviness somewhere on the medium scale. The core mechanic is relatively straight-forward: you acquire commissions (good old-fashioned fetch/delivery quests), you gather stuff that’s required by those commissions, you stop by at the local tavern to get some adventurers to join you and… you venture out to the darkness, where all the destination cities are. I really like how the pre-journey phase works: you buy stuff, you sell stuff for profit to adventurers (who then follow you on your journey), you collect commissions, upgrade your goods to high-quality ones… a nice little optimisation puzzle before venturing out into darkness.
It is absolutely vital that you do as much as you can in as few rounds as possible during your prep phase – you don’t want to waste your turn (you only have 13 of them per game!) for miniscule gains. The thing is – you can’t win this game by just selling stuff, or by just gaining prestige through fulfilling commissions. That would be super easy. No. You have to keep those two equally close as the lowest of those two will be used in the final scoring. Hence, you need to strike a fine balance between tinkering around the main town vs journeys in the dark.
Speaking of journeys in the dark – every now and then, you will have to take all the stuff and adventurers you amassed and deliver them to their destination cities. The mechanic behind doing so is quite interesting – based on the number of lanterns you have, you can opt for going the dark or better-lit path, each represented by a card with a short story snippet. Based on the number of players joining the caravan, you roll dice and the results will determine the cost or benefit you and fellow merchants will get. Once you’ve resolved the journey part, you then deliver commissions and adventurers to their destination, gain prestige and coins and -if you were the leader- also additional goodies.
You have probably noticed me mentioning the “caravan” and “leader” in the last paragraph. This is where the game shines the most – each journey, triggered by anyone, can be accompanied by everyone else. In other words, you can use someone’s turn to deliver people and commissions without using your own. You won’t get the leader bonuses and you will potentially face some penalties due to events taking place along the journey – but you also get an option to deliver to multiple cities within the region, not just one as it is the case for the leader. This by itself makes the option to tag along a vital strategy for maximising your prestige/coin profits and opens up door to a lot of tactics-driven decisions.
And believe me, you absolutely need to parasite on your opponents’ adventures while playing solo. The solo bot in this game does not fool around – although they have to spend goods to hire adventurers and deliver commissions, they don’t have to pay any gold nor keep track of what types of goods they have, and they tag along whenever they can deliver at least something in the region you are venturing into. The rules around bot’s movements and actions are very clear (solo cards are well laid-out), their decision matrix is as explicit as it can be so instead of figuring out their next steps, you can fully concentrate on trying to outsmart them.
Speaking from experience, the best strategy is to try to venture into places where the bot has nothing to deliver AND at the same time, prepare your caravan for tagging along later. Since you know where bot might head off to on their journey (their commissions and adventurers are public knowledge), you can sort of plan ahead. This reminds me of solo bots in Boonlake and Concordia where you can similarly see what’s going to happen and therefore, plan accordingly.
In my 10+ games against the solo bot, I have managed to win roughly half the time – the reason being a slight house rule where I calculate the average of the bot’s prestige and coins (which you can’t see as you collect his money behind a screen) for his base victory points – the original rule is to pick the lowest of those two. I haven’t even tried the included solo campaigns (two of them) but I plan to do so in the near future. Overall, I think the solo mode in this game is done remarkably well, provides a very challenging and human-like opponent, plays smoothly and just gives you a meaty, undiluted experience of the core game.
Merchants of the Dark Road is a pleasant surprise to me – a beautifully crafted euro with an interesting theme and some neat new mechanisms, this game feels refreshingly addictive and provides super smooth gameplay without any unnecessary complexity. As a massive fan of euro-games, I always welcome new additions to the genre – with this game, the designers have showed us yet again that there is always room for new and interesting ideas – even in the very crowded world of euro games.
