Description

The Era of Traveling Merchant, a.k.a. ?????, is a pick-up-and-deliver game of merchants peddling their wares.

A peddler who travels through various cities and sells goods was indispensable to running the economy. Players go around each city to buy goods and fulfill their orders. Getting the goods sold by other players will help a player become the best peddler. Become one of the world's richest and prestigious merchants by successfully managing your products in multiple cities.

To set up the game, nine city tiles are arranged in one of the suggested ways, with each tile being divided into colored zones to match the player colors. Six order cards are dealt from a deck, which show various demands from these nine cities.

Players get two actions on a turn from a move action, a cargo action, or a shipping action. Players can move to cities; can pick up cargo from a city and place the goods in their wagon (but not goods they dropped previously); or ship goods to their storehouse in the city with the demand. By fulfilling demands, players collect order cards, gaining victory points. By taking the most prominent order cards, players receive jewel bonuses. By building up sets of order cards, players can increase the capacity of their wagons and build trading houses in cities; trading houses give the player a third action each round, which gives the player an advantage and is one of the endgame conditions.

The game ends either when the decks are exhausted, the special cards (difficult orders) are lost, or when a player has four trading houses.

All players get the same number of turns, then a final score is taken, most points wins. Points come from order cards, jewels, and from getting the last wagon card (marked fin).