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Merchants Of The Middle Ages box art
1999 Ranked #2,894

Merchants Of The Middle Ages

Medieval trade game where merchants buy goods, load wagons, and send them between European cities for profit. Markets offer different returns and routes, so every shipment must find the best destination before rivals capture the opportunity.

Strategy Games Economic Medieval Commodity Speculation Pick-up and Deliver

Players

2-4

Play time

Not listed

Age

10+

Complexity

3.01/5

Rating

6.73

Harder to teach Highly interactive Deep strategy

Overview

At a glance

Is this game right for my group?

ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.

Teachability 2.3/5

Harder to teach

Replay value 4.1/5

High replayability

Interaction 3.8/5

Highly interactive

Player scaling 4.0/5

Scales well

Strategic depth 4.5/5

Deep strategy

See all 5 specifications

How it plays

How does it play?

A Medieval game of trade and commerce, Die Händler is set in Europe, where trade wagons carry wares between six cities on the board. Essentially, players buy goods, load them onto wagons and send them for maximum profit in other cities.

Core mechanisms

Key systems that shape the decisions players make.

Read the full game description

A Medieval game of trade and commerce, Die Händler is set in Europe, where trade wagons carry wares between six cities on the board. Essentially, players buy goods, load them onto wagons and send them for maximum profit in other cities. The whole game looks very inviting. The medieval cities depicted on the board, together with the player crests, cardboard coins, money pouches, sticker decorated wagons and wooden commodity pieces, immediately creates the right atmosphere for the players. There are six cities - Paris, Cologne, Brugge, Gent, Vienna and Genoa - which are interconnected by roads. Three wagons carry goods from one city to another. No-one owns the wagons or controls any of them single-handedly, and in principle a player can put commodities on any transport. There are six different commodities - salt, iron, wine, silk, cloth and food - all of limited supply. The goal of the game is to make money by delivering goods to the towns, and use the money to buy increases in status. The game ends after a certain number of deliveries have been made and the winner is the player with the highest level of status.

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Editions

Language and publisher variants currently recorded in the catalog.

Edition Year Language Publisher / Region
No editions imported yet.

Player resources

Rulebooks, player aids, FAQs, and solo resources.

No files imported yet.

Game and edition data

All specifications (5)

Play and group

Players
2–4
Best with
3–4
Play time
120 min
Age
10+
Complexity
3.0/5
Credits and catalog connections

Credits

Designers

2
Wolfgang Kramer Richard Ulrich

Artists

2
Jo Hartwig Stéphane Poinsot

Publishers

4
eggertspiele Filosofia Éditions Queen Games Z-Man Games

Linked items

No published linked games yet.