I have been loving the Knizia Renaissance we’re currently living through. With publishers like Bitewing Games, 25th Century Games, and Allplay revitalizing and reprinting Knizia classics, has me giddy. Knowing hidden gems are coming back into print and being given much-needed facelifts is exactly what we need in this hobby of continued excess and over-production.

So let’s see how Allplay’s Merchants of Andromeda, a reimplementation of Merchants of Amsterdam, fares in this crowded Knizia field.

Gameplay Overview:

Merchants of Andromeda is a meta-game featuring five different mini-games, all linked together through the use of drafting and bidding off action cards. On each player’s turn, they draw three cards from the Event Deck that drives the action of the game. The player then chooses one card to discard (for a resource), one to keep (to complete an action), and one to auction off to the entire table (where the winning player gets the resource and gets to complete the action). The auction is a countdown Dutch auction where bidding starts at 25 and ticks down until it hits a price a player wants to pay for the card. This timer can be done by players at the table, or with an optional app.

This TWO-SIDED Player Aid for this “lightweight” game.

In addition to the regular cards in the deck, there are some Event cards that will trigger the Event board to progress. These Events can either be nothing, a scoring event, or a Voting event where new rules or scoring conditions can be introduced.

For the actions that players can take with their cards, there are five different boards that players will be interacting with. For the purposes of this review, there’s no need to dive into the particularities, but they’re usually some sort of race or area majority that will trigger scoring for the player(s) furthest progressed in that particular board. As for flavor, these boards include actions like terraforming a planet, voting in an election, or mining for more resources.

Bid wisely, choose your cards correctly, and time scoring events carefully to become the winning merchant of Andromeda.

All SIX Game Boards, in all of their terrible-to-set-up glory.

Game Experience:

I cannot bury the lede here: this is far and away the worst board game I’ve ever played. Give me Phase 10, Exploding Kittens, Chutes and Ladders… anything over this title. Let me break down the three main reasons this game should be shot out of a cannon.

The first is the impact of player choice. While it seems to be crucial for players to choose their cards for actions, resources, and bidding with finesse, it simply doesn’t seem to have much impact on the outcome of the game. If I focus on one area, I get an exponential amount of points. If I spread my focus amongst the five boards, I get fewer points, but they still generally add up to the same amount of points as if I focused on one area.

A resource track in a Euro game? Say it isn’t so!

In addition, the Dutch auction for the additional cards is simply uninteresting. For one, the game lacks tension for such a tedious countdown-style auction, bringing each round to a halt. But also, because players are bidding with their victory points, you don’t really see the swinginess that comes from other auction games: it doesn’t make sense to sit out of three auctions to overpay for one action because you’re paying with victory points, and, as stated earlier, since no one action seems to hold much weight, there’s never an incentive to bid a high amount for a particular action. If I advance in the terraforming area, for instance, I may gain 3 – 4 points for completing it, so why would I bid 15+ points for the right to do so?

(Ok, but the little ballot boxes are pretty cool.)

The second major flaw of the game is the overbearing fiddliness of the rules. This feels like it should be a lightweight game to introduce families to the hobby. But with five different mini-games with extremely nuanced rules for tie-breakers, the game takes 15 – 20 minutes to teach, and players constantly need to be reminded of these edge cases in order to be competitive. But again, in a game where player agency is weak, why would players care about tie breakers for a particular mini-game? There’s no point in stopping the flow of the game to explain the tie breaker on the fourth mini-game for the third time when the impact of such an action is minimal.

The final major flaw in the game is that there is no momentum. Because there’s no real weight to player actions, and so many stops and starts to flow from rules questions, the game never comes together to push the table forward. There’s no “carrot on a stick” to keep the table engaged. Each choice is simultaneously meaningless and fraught with rule questions, leading to anything interesting happening simply not happening at all, or being lost on the table because the extra fiddliness is unwelcome.

Final Thoughts:

There is nothing to like about Merchants of Andromeda. Player choice, agency, and impact are incredibly low. The rules for the five separate mini-games are tough to internalize. The game never comes together to bring excitement and levity to the experience. The box lists the developer with the credit of “Additional Gameplay by”, when the design really needed a small army of people on a “Gameplay Reduced by” team.

Final Score: 1 Star: The worst game designed in the Andromeda Galaxy.

Hits:
• Detailed, thematic art
• Short play time
• It comes in a box!

Misses:
• Player actions are meaningless
• The worst auction in gaming
• Uninspired Events