I was lucky enough to get to play this game at my local monthly games session. I liked the look of the game, but with the hefty price tag I wanted to play it before I committed to buying. As there are only two reviews on the game at the moment I thought I would post my thoughts. It was a four player game with two people who had never played it before and two people who had only played it once.
About Me
So before I start my review I thought I would explain a bit about the games that I like and play regularly. This is so people see whether they will also have a similar opinion of Duck Dealer. I regularly play board games with different types of people, so play a mixture of light games like Citadelsand Carcassonnewith my parents, medium games like Amun-Reand Stone Agewith my friends and more involved games like Le Havreand Brass: Lancashirewith my boyfriend and hardcore gamers. I really like space games and was not put off by the average game weight of 3.96 for Duck Dealer. In fact I would say it made me want to try it even more for a bit of a challenge. I have never played Merchant of Venusso I can not comment on how similar the games are.
A Quick Overview
The idea of the game is to build up a supply of lots of different coloured energy disks then go on a journey. This involves visiting lots of different planets and trading goods. Certain goods can be combined together to make more advanced goods that are worth more points. In your journey you use up an energy disc for each action that you perform; red for moving, blue for trading and yellow for building.
Most points are obtained from being the first person to build a building or being the first person to give specific goods to consumers. The second time this is done there are a lot less victory points. The amount of goods that your ship can hold is dependent on the amount of cargo holds you have on your ship. In turn adding more items to your ship slows you down, but you can gain more energy discs a turn and carry more items, so there is a trade off.
Now the journeys are the whole game. The collecting of the discs is just to prepare yourself for the journey ahead. In the whole game there will only be 24 journeys in total and the game ends immediately when the 24th journey has been completed. 304
This means when there are only a few spaces left it is a bit of a mad rush for everyone to get their last journey in and get the most points.
My Thoughts
I really enjoyed the idea behind the game, but felt that the downtime was a little too much. This gets worse as the game progresses as there are a lot more possible actions for a lot of victory points. You can definitely over think things and that can become a bit frustrating; Firstly for the people waiting for you to have a go and second for the player trying to work out if it is worth while making a journey. In the end I just gave up thinking too hard, which meant I did not get very many points.
The scoring seemed a bit silly. Most of the time people were gaining points in units of ten and moving around the score track many times. This made it hard to see how many points people had. At one point one person had about 250 points and one person was on about 50 points, but they were on the same place on the track. It may have been easier to make all the goods a lower number (maybe units of 5) so there was no lapping of people on the score track.
The journeys are the essence of the game. This is how you get your victory points and they need to be planned very well in advance. The problem is that if someone before you gets to all the consumers before you do, then there are less victory points available and you will have to rethink your plan. This means it is very hard to plan in advance. I found I would just take the energy discs and only decide what I would do in my journey while I was taking it. This lead to silly mistakes and wasting energy discs, but I found was the best way to play for me.
There is obviously an optimum way to play the game and to perform your journeys, but they are very hard to accomplish. You could sit there for ten minutes deciding what you will do while everyone waits, but the other players get bored. For this reason there is a lot of downtime and I would not advise people to play this game with AP prone players.
I thought the three different types of energy were not well balanced. The yellow discs for building were a lot worse than the other two. I would of preferred a game where all three had the same weight.
A Point From My Boyfriend
So the other new player to this game was my boyfriend. 884