Frank Branham: Perry Rhodan and Merchants of Venus Review
There hasn't been a lot of information or people begging for the Perry Rhodan game that entered the Kosmos two-player line. This is even though the author claims that he was trying to design a card game version of Merchants of Venus. I was totally hooked by that line.
It is a fairly easy game to review if you know much about Merchants of Venus. Of course, no one reading this actually knows much about Merchants of Venus or has already dismissed it as either too long or too fluffy. Looks like I'll have to review that as well.
Merchants of Venus Review
This is a classic pick-up and deliver game with some similarity to Star Traders and Empire Builders. You are presented with a board, spaceships, and about 30 billion counters.
The basic play is that you roll some dice, add up the pips, and move your ship that many spaces until you land somewhere. Then you can buy goods cheaply to sell at another place for profit. Said profit can be used to buy upgrades for your ship or more goods. Keep doing that for a couple of hours until someone reaches a target value.
I think most people lost interest in the game at that point citing such heresies as "Roll and Move" or "Two Hours." More's the pity.
The game actually goes through three phases:
- Exploration: Planets start face down. Move your ship to a planet, and you flip up a token to find out who lives there. They get their initial supply of goods, and you get a free one as the discoverer.
- Locating trade routes: Certain planets like certain types of things. As enough of the planets come up, you can start to work out a trade route. These tend to be 3-5 stops long.
- Cleanup: As players milk the trade routes, goods are pulled from the game. That means that short routes and duplicated stops will run dry, and players will have to adapt.
- Event tiles: These litter the board. Some are free stuff. A lot consist of three-color variants with payment values. You want to cross these, you have to pay.
- Navigation Hell: There are a few spots on the board where you can shortcut through nebulae or asteroid fields. Problem is, you need specific dice numbers to go the way you want to go.
- Passengers: One shot passengers turn up occasionally. Easy to carry, but sporadic and often slightly out of the way.
- Orbital stations: Landing on a planet to trade takes extra time. Some of your money can be invested into orbital stations which allow faster trades, and a cut of anyone else's profit who trades there.
- Ship upgrades: Aside from different ship types that either allow you to carry more or move faster, you can fit stuff onto your ship. Some of these allow you to skip spaces of certain colors (including the event counter tolls of that color), or roll more dice when entering Navigation Hell. There are also lasers for the occasional act of piracy.
The goods system makes slow changes to the entire game over time, and the game really reminds me of classics like Elite (C64 and Apple) and Space Trader (old BBS game). You will lose the occasional turn to bad dice luck. if that bothers you over much, bolt together a fast 5-die ship with a red engine. You can't carry much, but you'll get there.
Money is always tight, so you are often torn between new toys for your ship, planetary investments, and keeping cash on hand for buying new goods.
Perry Rhodan Die Kosmische Hanse Review
So there is now this card game that tries to distill a 2+ hour space epic into a 30-45 minute two-player card game. This is a mostly impossible design goal, and pretty much doomed to failure.
In this rare case, Herr Glumpler pretty much managed it.
Perry Rhodan trims the galaxy down to six planets and one solar system. It is easier to move towards the sun via the single die roll. (You know, the whole gravity thing.) Goods are free to purchase and can be sold at a single destination planet.
Most of the elements of the board game are present:
- Changing goods: Goods cards are double-sided. As you deliver, flip them over. Pairs leave the game, which tends to resemble the drying up of planets from the board game.
- Exploration and events: This is driven by a couple of equipment/action decks. You get a card every turn. Some are single-use effect cards (including the wacky teleport and piracy cards); some are equipment cards you can pay to bolt onto your ship.
- Passengers: These also turn up in the Action deck.
- Orbital Stations: Check. In the action deck.
- Advanced Engines: Check. Here, they just add one to the movement die roll.
(My game with Sandi had her squeak out a win by building out her ship with dual auto-jumpgate technologies. Her freaky little White Star could kind of hop around much faster than my tug could turn up and unload multiple cargo bays.)
The game is reasonably playable in the German version. The action and event deck has a ton of text, but the cheat sheet in the rules covers a single page front and back. There are perhaps 12 card types that you pick up after a couple of games.
The entire thing will fit inside of 30 minutes with practice, which makes it a remarkable adaptation. We need to get an update on the English version. This is a game well worth picking up.
Editor's note: Jay Tummelson at Rio Grande has said that he's releasing an English-language version, but there's no release date in sight as of Jan. 26. © 2008 Frank Branham
Posted by Frank Branham on Jan 26, 2008 at 02:00 AM in Columnists, Frank Branham / 2410
Comments:
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Really nice review, Frank! I’ve my eye on this one and was hoping someone who knows how the underlying game is supposed to work would review it. Good job! Posted by Diane Close on Jan 26, 2008 at 09:49 AM | #
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Merchants of Venus is my favorite game from that era. Perry Rhodan is definitely on my to-buy list, but I would also like to see something that supports more than 2 players. I would love to see something from FFG in the star trader genre. Posted by Rob Cannon on Jan 26, 2008 at 10:22 AM | #
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Excellent review - my copy of Merchants long since hit the trade pile, but I wanted to like it more than I did. This sounds like it may hit the spot. Posted by Mark "Fluff Daddy" Jackson on Jan 26, 2008 at 10:54 AM | #
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Fantastic! I had no idea that this title had anything to do with Merchants of Venus. I bought Merchants back in the day on a whim, and it was a great decision. The cheesy title and artwork drew me in. I can’t wait to hear more about the English edition. Thanks for posting this. Posted by Ogdred Weary on Jan 26, 2008 at 02:41 PM | #
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Nice review, Frank. I liked the game a fair bit but the way the ship improvements are costed I found a bit annoying - I mean the way any improvements you build on a turn cost you x, where x is the number of improvements you built on previous turns. It seems to make it so your initial draw pretty much fixes your ship type, as it’s too expensive to expand your ship later once you’ve dropped another couple of improvements down? Or did we miss something? pk Posted by Patrick Korner on Jan 26, 2008 at 04:18 PM | #
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Patrick, I agree with you to a degree… Once you start building your ship, you’re fairly committed to a direction. I once tried to play the card that allows you to draw an additional card each turn as my first improvement, but it didn’t work for me in that game. dale Posted by Dale Yu on Jan 26, 2008 at 06:25 PM | #
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Very good review. I just got to play perry rhodan once last week and it was a cool game. I agree about the point regarding the ship building. It can also be annoying if you end up with a handfull of ship upgrades. I do like the feature that cards can be used for “defense”.
Posted by Lee Fisher on Jan 26, 2008 at 08:08 PM | #
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I’ve played it 5 times so far. I actually like that ship powers and event cards come up totally randomly. It really has to be that way to keep the game from growing old really quickly. Unlike MoV, equipment build outs do not really commit you that much. It doesn’t seem to make sense to have more than 2 of anything, and the equipment is not THAT powerful. There is a reasonably good balance to all of the cards. Hyperspace and the Orbital stations seem weakest. Curiously, I believe that the best card to get early is the additional card per turn. We’ve had build outs where it made sense to have 4 or 5 equipment cards. A lot of that depends on how many pairs are taken out of the game by that point. Posted by Frank Branham on Jan 26, 2008 at 11:56 PM | #
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Well you put Perry Rhodan on the radar, Frank. Of course your dismissal of your readers as being uninformed or uninterested in MoV is silly and wrong. I’ve played dozens of MoV games, and suspect I still have dozens more to play. But, Thanks! I had not paid any attention to Perry Rhodan - not my flavor of SF. But the MoV link is interesting. I admit to being a bit dubious, MoV is great because of its epic qualities. A shorter simpler version might work, but I’m gonna have to see it to believe it. Definitely on my try list. Posted by Kevin_Whitmore on Jan 27, 2008 at 02:31 AM | #
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I (am the author and I) do not want to create any expectations that my game is not able to fulfill. So if you really want to know how much “Merchant” is in “Die Kosmische Hanse” without actually buying/playing it please take a look here: http://tinyurl.com/3ym33y As usual - do not hesitate to contact me if this leaves any questions un-answered.
Heinrich
Posted by Heinrich Glumpler on Jan 27, 2008 at 05:39 AM | #
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How had I not noticed that this game was from my good man Heinrich Glumpler?!? Heinrich, I SHALL play this, and very probably will buy it. Long live Dicke Dämonen, Tschuk, Techo Witches, Vulkan! and of course Heinrich!! Posted by Nathan Morse on Jan 27, 2008 at 10:45 AM | #
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Thank You, Nathan :-) I am happy that you are - apparently - enjoying my games - for me that’s what it’s all about designing games. Posted by Heinrich Glumpler on Jan 27, 2008 at 12:02 PM | #
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Thanks Frank. I will get hold of this one. Never did like the Navigation Hell, or the time aspects. Posted by Mike Siggins on Jan 27, 2008 at 08:44 PM | #
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Navigation Hell was kind of nice. In general, it was optional to go into the nebulas, and you had to take it into account when setting up your routes. And working out the risk/reward of making it through that nebula cloud in the middle is pretty hairy. Posted by Frank Branham on Jan 27, 2008 at 09:04 PM | #
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Frank, Thanks for comparing these two games. I’d heard the same thing about PR but was skeptical… it just sounded too good to be true. It’s definitely moved up on my WANT list! Posted by Kevin Wood on Jan 28, 2008 at 09:36 AM | #
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I love MoV with two or three players and would have Perry Rhodan if Jay wasn’t doing it in English. After reading this, I may have to have two copies, a German now and an English when RGG comes out with it. Posted by Scott Russell on Jan 28, 2008 at 02:41 PM | #
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Frank, Nice reviews - though you’ve missed what I consider to be the best thing in Perry Rhodan, the mechanism by which goods are removed from the game. I don’t feel Perry Rhodan captures all of MoV in 30 minutes - but it’s a very nice little game, and I like it nearly as much with two players as MoV. Since Merchant of Venus is among my ten favorite games… Joe (who got to teach Perry Rhodan to Jay B^) Posted by Joe Huber on Jan 29, 2008 at 01:33 PM | #
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Hi Joe - a very special “Thank You” to you! I am *very* happy that Jay decided to publish it - and I think we all know how much that depended on how he learned the game :-) Posted by Heinrich Glumpler on Jan 30, 2008 at 10:43 AM | #
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