Dale of Merchants is a deck-building, set collection game with all of the animals.

Does it play smoothly? Or does it Stall?

It is an age of great discoveries. New and wonderful items find their way into the hands of the greatest merchants. If there ever is a place those traders love, it is the town of Dale. There’s an extraordinary guild in the Dale founded by the greatest merchants. The tricky part is getting the membership since one must win the annual trading competition to be invited to the guild.

Dale of Merchants Game Play

I have the 3 games, the collector’s edition and the promo and I think that gives me 27 decks of different animals. You only need 1 more than the number of players so 5 at most. Take out the correct number of decks to set up.

The animals in each deck are numbered so give a value of 1 card from each Animalfolk to each player and a number of junk cards so each player has 10 cards in their deck.

Shuffle the 2-5 value Animalfolk cards together to make the market deck and lay 5 out on the market board.

Each player shuffles their deck and draws their maximum hand size which is 5 by default.

For gameplay, players take turns taking 1 action in the Action Phase then performing their Cleanup Phase.

Actions Phase

Let’s look at the actions:

Market – Discard cards from hand for their printed value to buy a card of that value plus the cost printed for that card on the market board.

Technique – Reveal a technique card, resolve all of the effects in order and discard it unless instructed not to.

Stall – Build a Stack in your stall. The cards in the stack need to all be from the same animal folk and their value needs to match exactly to the next value stall. So the first is value 1, the second 2 etc

Inventory – Discard 0+ cards from your hand

In the clean-up phase, the active player will drawback u to their maximum hand size and the next player takes their turn.

The first player to build their 8th stall wins

Theme

Animals and such. It’s fun and they thematically fit with their ability but the whole merchants guild thing doesn’t come through.

Setup & Rulebook

The setup is simple but fiddly as it always is when you have to put specific things together. You have to get them out, remove parts of them, shuffle the rest. it’s a whole thing.

The rulebooks plural, in this case, are fine but miss some key detail, especially around activating some technique cards.

Components & Artwork

There is a really good website you can use to pick which animals go into the game. You can slide sliders to pick difficulty, meanness, randomness etc

The cards are OK but I’ve always played them sleeved. The insert is really nice and everything fits really well.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s easier to teach than most deck-building games as you only have 1 action per turn. Games with cards in hand are also difficult to teach. But as they’re not too many cards it should be fine.

There is a lot of text for a new player, especially an inexperienced gamer. This hinders accessibility too.

Dale of Merchants Summary

This works like a slow deck-building game which is how you get the cards to make the stalls and win the game.

This means the pace of the game is really quick as tuns are fast. You only do one thing on a turn and usually, you know what that is by the time your turn comes around so you’re ready.

The problem is, buying cards every round is really powerful so it’s all I do. No point in spending actions playing them for abilities, unless they let you draw cards. In my first game, I lost by 1 turn and in the second game, I won easy. All I did was buy cards I would need to build a stall and play them when I could.

So, while I wanted to like this game, I just didn’t enjoy it.

Jesta ThaRogue