If you’ve got even the slightest interest in heavier board games, than Uwe Rosenberg is already a familiar name to you. If not, then just know that he is the paragon of German board gaming sensibility. Farms, sheep, resources that need managed, and not a bit of aggression to find between the players. That’s not to say his games aren’t competitive, but rather he prefers a passive aggressive style, sort of like my mother. This style of avoiding direct conflict, with each player doing their own thing to the best of their ability and interacting indirectly, is the hallmark of “Euro” gaming. As the creator of Agricola, he’s one of the few board game designers who can legitimately say he invented a genre, but Merkator is a unique game by any of his standards. For whatever reason, Uwe decided to abandon his wooden sheep and pastoral themes to go after a pick up and deliver style game set during the Hundred Years War. This game was released quite some time ago (measured in board game years, of course) and it flew under the radar of the hobby even when it was brand new, but if we’re going to be talking about solo-playable board games then we need to spare a moment to talk about this hidden gem wooden cube.
Your mission? To pick up colored cubes from point A, and bring them to point B.
Riveting stuff, I know – and just wait until you see this incredibly exciting box art!
God, doesn’t that make you want to run out and push some wooden cubes around?
Its the most Euro of Euro themes putting you in the role of a merchant trying to profit from a war most Americans probably never learned about. We get it, Europe, you’re better than us. (No, seriously, take me with you…)
It’s aesthetics aren’t going to win any awards; the highly abstracted map of Europe which makes up the main board doesn’t even need to be there. Ultimately, you’re only concerned with boxes where goods pile up, waiting for your entrepreneurial cylinder of wood to designate THAT city as your stopping point, pick up the cubes, and if you’ve planned properly, drop off other cubes to fulfill contracts. If it sounds like it’s dry, well… that’s because it is. However, that’s not a bad thing. Usually.
I get take credit for introducing you to this one, Jeni! I mean, I don’t get to take credit for ever BEATING you at it…
Merkator was released at a time when games weren’t afraid to wear their character on their sleeve. I can still recall the sounds of my group moaning as I placed the box on the table. At least one person thought I’d brought a jigsaw puzzle to board game day and was too polite to tell me. For the record, it’s not that I’m completely ignoring theme. Jamie Stonemeier’s Scythe managed record sales and Kickstarter backings through the excellent use of theme, convincing people they were fighting a popularity contest of a war with villagers, resources, and mighty mechs. Strip all the art and miniatures away, though, and it’s just a wooden cube-pusher under the hood. And the German team has refined it in a way that American developers are still catching up with.
But that cube pushing is something Merkator excels at! It just goes to show that if you’re going to do something, then you may as well do it right, because Merkator manages to be charming underneath its dull, unpolished veneer. Maybe we’re finally seeing Kickstarter’s pernicious influence starting to die down a little, and it’s all for the best. But Uwe Rosenberg never needed to beg for money before releasing his games. He doesn’t need flashy miniaturess and luxurious components to give you a box of fun. Instead, he’s got hundreds of cubes and a couple decks of cards.
Seriously… have we mentioned the cubes? There’s black cubes, and blue cubes, and red cubes, and green cubes…
Not pictured: Jeni just off to the left deciding that the cubes needed the spotlight.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a plodding game of resource management – but in fact Merkator manages to be a bit more nimble than the average Euro game, coming in at a very reasonable play time of about 30 minutes per player. The manual is incredibly thin, too, with only a handful of rules scattered across a scant few pages. Solo gamers rejoice, you can easily get more than one play of this game under your belt every time it hits the table.
Uwe Rosenberg once said that he starts with a solo game and builds out from there – but I’m not sure Merkator got the same treatment. Which is fine; the game is so different from the rest of his library that I wouldn’t expect the development cycle to look the same, either. Several concessions are made in the name of both challenge and practicality, but with the added benefit of being just a little bit faster to play. Coins aren’t used in the solo game, and in classic Rosenberg tradition it turns into a “beat-your-own-score” extravaganza. In fairness, this time Uwe has lined up some goals for you in the manual, giving a barometer to judge your success by.
Laid out on your table, coffee in hand, it’s a pleasant puzzle that gives you almost all the feel of playing with other people. Money isn’t used, contracts are traded for cards instead, and obviously you can’t take bonus actions on other people’s turns when there aren’t other people to play with… Not that I don’t have people to play with…
Jeni, tell them I have a friend.
The time goes quick and before you know it you’ll be optimizing the last bits of your final turns. As much as I enjoy the experience, though, I’ve felt a little unsatisfied at the end of each game. For one thing, the difficulty of success is a little bit lower than the average Uwe Rosenberg game. Despite my love of them, I’m notoriously bad at games, and the fact that I win about half my plays (even when I’m sure I’ve made critical mistakes) means that the calibration of his scale might be a little off. Since you’re just challenging your personal best in the end, this may or may not matter to you, but I like to have another yardstick to measure against. In a perfect world my solo games give me a simulated opponent or bot, but that’s not Uwe Rosenberg’s style. He didn’t do it then and he’s not about to start now.
It’s all good – but never really reaches greatness as a solo experience. Removing currency speeds up play, sure, but subtracts a big aspect of the game. Not being able to follow people is to be expected, but the best plans and strategies make good use of these bonus actions on other players’ turns – leaving you with a more monotonous, routine approach turn after turn until it’s over. The verdict?
3.5 out of 5 cups.
Gather some friends around the table, though, and you’re sure to get a different experience, right? Well… mostly. Just because money and bonus actions are back in the game, doesn’t mean the core experience has changed a whole lot, either. Plus, where you put several chunks of the game back into play – you removed something else potentially more important in a Euro game: predictability.
Two players don’t suffer so much from this, but there’s a certain amount of chaos introduced with each player. Long range plans become harder and harder to form as resources are snatched up. And, unlike his worker placement games, the resources aren’t added back in a predictable fashion every round where you could hedge your bets. Instead, resources are pile up based on players utilizing neighboring spots and certain minor areas of the board. You could maybe predict the moves of one other player, but two or three? Not very likely.
It’s not even the brilliance of your opponent’s play that will get to you. There are far too many contracts in play with far too many requirements to really set about getting in the way of other players – instead, they will stumble into screwing you, like your sloppy, drunk buddy bumping into your drink, spilling it in the lap of the pretty blonde you were chatting up. It’s no better when it’s your own stumble, either. Instead of getting the satisfaction of executing a master plan, you instead find yourself apologizing for ruining the plans of someone else – legitimately, there was no way you could have known what they were trying to accomplish.
“Strategy” is the ability to put together several moves towards long term goals. You define your approach, you plan contingencies, and you have a destination in mind. “Tactical” gameplay is more reactive – you adapt to changing conditions, tweaking your plan to make the best out of what you’re given. From solo play to four players, this game crosses over the entire spectrum.
As you approach the maximum of four players, the game starts to turn from one of strategic planning to one of tactical adaptation. You’re no longer the master planner of his business, looking out over his commercial empire and piecing together brilliant market moves. Instead, you become a frazzled door to door salesman, hopping between Hambug and Paris and hoping there’s a customer for green wooden cubes. Even with the flexibility to choose how you’ll score points through the game’s buildings (simply cards you’ll pick up), with three people changing the landscape of play between your turns you just won’t be able to predict what will come around. That contract to bring clothes to Newfoundland suddenly grows stale as the only thing leftover is iron for weapons. Well… Canadians are renowned for their violent tendencies. Maybe they’ll take them, anyway.
There’s no denying, though, that even though the game looks like the cover of a history textbook, it’s been a success when it hits the table. The core concepts of the game are immediately easy to understand for even the most casual of board game players: You pick up these cubes here, put them on your board, and sell them at the destinations on your card. Most everyone can wrap their heads around that, and it plays in a reasonable amount of time. So long as you’re prepared to say “it’s more fun than it looks” every time you get the box out, you and your friends should have a good time with this.
4 out of 5 cookies!