Merchants and Marauders, Cinque Terre offer strategy

Looking for fun board games that involve strategy, chance and trade? You might want to check out the epic pirate adventure Merchants and Marauders from Z-Man Games, and the race to secure Italian produce markets in Rio Grande Games' Cinque Terre: The Five Villages. 

In the recently reprinted Merchants and Marauders, two to four players take on the role of a ship captain as he navigates the pirate-infested waters of the Caribbean in the age of wood and sails. Various ports abound where captains can buy or sell cargo, recruit crew, upgrade their ship, pick up missions or seek to learn the truth about rumors. Some goods are in demand at certain ports at various times, and captains can double the price for their cargo there. 

The economic/trade aspect of this game is fun and challenging as you try to best your opponents and make more money, but in Merchants and Marauders, that means playing it safe. More daring players may choose to attack merchant shipping vessels and plunder their gold and cargo. Such piracy can offer great rewards to captains, but also closes the offended nation's ports to your trade. Bounties can be placed on your head, inducing fellow players to attack you. Also, random event cards place British, French, Dutch and Spanish vessels on the board, which have no patience for such marauders and ruthlessly hunt them down. 

The winner is the first player to reach 10 glory points. Glory points are gained by selling multiple in-demand goods at a port, defeating another player at sea, plundering gold from a merchant vessel, completing special missions scattered about the board, or proving rumors to be true. Additionally, players may bank some of their gold in fun treasure chests that come with the game, in effect creating surprise glory points that can help to determine the winner. 

The great thing about Merchants and Marauders is the game's depth and breadth. The game comes with a plethora of fun, plastic ship miniatures, representing players, pirates and other nations. There are so many strategic options and ways to gain glory points that players are constantly engaged, contemplating better trades, daring missions or a life of piracy. The event cards can also start wars between nations, often spelling trouble for pirates and honest traders alike. 

All these options can be a drawback, however, as players may experience a bit of analysis paralysis when contemplating each move. Game length may be a problem, especially for new players, so it is wise to set aside several hours. This is a minor complaint in what is really a wonderful game with a truly epic feel and scope. If you like the pirate theme and enjoy adventure-filled games with many player options, walk the plank and check out Merchants and Marauders. 

Cinque Terre: The Five Villages is a new game of economics and trade that takes two to five players to the five villages of the Italian Riviera. Each player represents an ambitious produce seller eager to meet orders and sell the most goods. 

The board consists of the villages and three harvest areas. Players can take several actions on their turn, including movement, selling, harvesting and drawing cards. Produce cards allow players to harvest certain fruits and vegetables in the harvest area, which can then be sold in the villages. At the end of the game the player who has earned the most lira wins. 

The produce is represented by colored cubes, which are taken from the harvest area to the player board, then placed next to the city on the player board when sold. Order cards allow for bonuses if certain produce is sold in certain cities. All players are given a starting produce order card that must be fulfilled by the end of the game or money is lost. Additionally, ambitious players who manage to sell a number of goods to a single village are rewarded with a bonus tile. 

Its hard for me to reconcile EarthBound with any video games Ive played since. Most games traffic in repetitive gristly thrills, but EarthBound focuses on emotion, on yearning. The team behind Call of Duty promotes the realism of its weaponry,The Motorola amagiccube Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. which implies their pride in its resultant gore, but EarthBounds marketing campaign primarily hinged on scratch and sniff stickers designed to evoke the smell of hotdogs and vomit. Hundred million dollar games like Grand Theft Auto IV are made by reclusive Lamborghini-driving auteurs and massive teams of developers, programmed to simulate American hustle, but I dont think theres a game that embraces and satirizes Americas sentimental mongrel spirit better than EarthBound, which was produced by less than 20 people, helmed by a copywriter-turned-philosopher. 

Im starting this book now,An cleaningservicesydney is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. and writing about starting this book now, for a few reasons. The first is the most obvious and the most perennial: Im on a deadline. Im also tempted to lose myself in further research, but I know that could lead to a creative paralysis, so Im preempting that youll-never-know-enough anxiety by starting today. Im also writing about writing right now self-narrating, self-aware, like some of the most powerful moments in EarthBound because Im thinking about time. 

A few days ago, I called my older brother for the first time in a year. Well, nearly a year. We had spent time with each other when I got married June 16th, 2012 but its been a while, and major events have occurred in both our lives and I havent called the guy. I felt and still feel bad about this. I thought this book about EarthBound would be the perfect excuse to reconnect with him, get us talking again. Why I thought I needed a writing project to reconnect with my brother instead of any of the various quakes in our lives familial death, lost jobs, new homes is mysterious to me. Mysterious if I chalk it up to something more than Well, Im just an arsehole. So when I called him a few days ago, I felt guilty. 

You start up EarthBound and you see three somber logos: Nintendo, Ape, Halken.An cleaningservicesydney is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. White on black. The Ape Inc. logo is hard to make out scratchy white lines rendered by the Super Nintendos 16-bit CPU but it seems to be a Neanderthal man holding a torch next to the word APE, spelled out with bones. The next company, Halken, now known as HAL Laboratory Inc., is named after the brilliant and murderous HAL 9000 computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Halkens logo reminds me of something, so I trawl the internet. I search for Terminator 2: Judgement Day, a movie I watched roughly six thousand times in my childhood, trying to find the name and fictive logo of the company that manufactures Skynet, another cybernetic machine that tries to eradicate its master.The feeder is available on drying chipcard equipped with folder only. The Cyberdyne Systems logo comes up and its too pyramidal, so I keep looking. I google Warner Bros.The whole variety of the brightest rtls is now gathered under one roof. 70s logo and hit symbolic paydirt the vintage WB logo is a prelude to Halkens dots and dashes, and its designed by Saul Bass, a designer whom Ive come to love while learning about design, trying to feel learned enough to feel competent enough to say to other people, Yes, I will design your book cover and it will look great. The synchronicity here spooks me. Whats even deeper about this dig into EarthBounds opening credit iconography is that both companies explicitly reference 2001, the movie that blew my twelve-year-old mind more than any other filmic experience, injecting philosophical questions into my kid-sized head that I didnt even know could exist. 
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