Flashback Friday - Merchant of Venus - Love It or Hate It? Do You Still Play It?

The FFG version made a small tweak to the map which opened it up a bit, but left out the solo rules from the original , which would be an easy thing to retrofit with a handful of chits and the chart from the AH version..

****NEWSFLASH******
Bought. (Avalon Hill version)
***END NEWSFLASH****

This thread got me to finally get my copy on the table after sitting around in my vast pile of unplayed games for 5 years or so. Great game, everyone loved it.

From a storytelling perspective, I didn't feel like there was much there. I'd much rather play Firefly for that feeling of actually inhabiting a universe and getting some interaction with the other players via competition for equipment and jobs.

This is most definitely the better straight up game though. We were all impressed by how straightforward and quick moving the turns were, with not a whole lot of downtime. This is important, as our group takes on average 100% longer to play any given game than most, for whatever reason.

A few things we got wrong or had to clarify on the first play, some it it my fault for bad rules reading, some FFGs fault for bad rules writing. Jotting them down so I can easily reference them in the future.

* You can only buy Good (singular), not Goods, with a single buy action
* You can't buy the factory good until someone buys the factory deed
* When you barter equipment, you don't get cash. It can only be turned into goods, equipment, deeds, etc. Important for the last turn net worth grab.
* If you use the IOU you can buy as many things as you want as long as the total cost stays below the IOU value, and it doesn't count as a buy action. If you need to inject any additional cash though, it does.
* If you have red/yellow drives, and you turn over a red/yellow hazard encounter space, it doesn't count against your movement
* If you've already set your navigation dice and run into a navigation space where you'd have to go back the way you came, your move ends.
* if you start on a navigation space, you pick a direction. If you roll dice that can match, you must go that way. Otherwise, you can pick any die and go the way it allows.