Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
In ????? (Jade Merchant), players are the heads of trader caravans who try to accumulate the most valuable goods like gold, spices, and jade.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
In ????? (Jade Merchant), players are the heads of trader caravans who try to accumulate the most valuable goods like gold, spices, and jade. Each round, they have to outbid each other backwards so that the least greedy one may choose the first cards of the current pool; more specifically, each player in turn declares how many cards they want to take, and whoever declares the smallest number takes that many cards. (A player can declare 0.5 less than the number they want to take, and if they do so, they return one card from their hand to the center.) The remaining players then bid for the rest of the cards, with this process repeating until each player takes cards. Each treasure has its own scoring rules depending on how many you have or how they combine with other cards in your collection. After resolving all cards this way, the player with the highest value of goods wins.
