Merchant of Venus: Board Game Review - If you ever played "Elite"...

What's in the box? A 6-pane board, dice, player tokens, paper money, two rule books, player guides and a ridiculous number of small pieces of cardboard.
Our box also includes some paper maps/score sheets and an ice-cube tray.
As per the box, this is suitable for 1 to 6 players aged 12 and up, with a maximum game time of 3 hours.
This review is of the original 1988 version of the game. I picked up a mint-condition copy in 2010, just weeks before I discovered a re-make was due. The re-make is allegedly simplified and if anyone has a copy, I'd like to hear what you think. We were introduced to the game by our good friends Margaret & Don, who had played it to death with their children back in the day.
Back in the '80s, when home computers were a new thing, there was a space game called "Elite" (which has also recently been re-made). In it you had a small ship and flew around a fictitious galaxy trading what goods you could carry in your hold and occasionally picking up space junk and asteroids. After a while you could upgrade your ship and get good at fighting pirates. It was the best computer game I ever played.
This is the board game equivalent, and equally wonderful. The set-up and take-down are a bit of a chore, but the ice-cube tray speeds things up.

Who, What, Where, Why, When, How

The aim of the game is to make money as quickly as possible by trading products between fourteen cultures. You can play to an agreed amount of money, or set a time limit. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that as the game begins you don't know where the cultures are - the galaxy is full of unexplored planets and uncharted asteroids. The care which went into the game is amazing. The rule book doubles as a Gazeteer of The Cluster written by someone with a love of Douglas Adams' works.
All players start with a Scout ship, and during the game can upgrade to a Clipper (faster), Transporter (slightly larger), or Freighter (much larger, but slower). The speed of ship is defined by the number of dice you roll to move it - 2, 3 or 4. Each Hold can carry one palette of trade goods or two bits of Equipment (more on those later) or Fares. Yes, you too can pick up hitch-hikers trying to see the universe for less than 30 Altairian Dollars a day!

Set-up

In addition to the game itself, you will need...

A cereal bowl
Whisky glasses (or a similar flat-bottomed glass).
An ice-cube tray.
Many zip-lock bags

The culture tokens and player aid showing cultures, ships and equipment prices

Each culture is represented by a large square with their name and number, indicating their trading partners. They also have a supply of trade goods. Humans (4b) sell Rock Videos for A$120, which higher number cultures the Shenna (5), Yxklyx (6), Zum (7a) and Eeepeeep (7b) will buy for A$200. They in turn sell goods that other cultures will buy. Humans will buy from lower number cultures the Nillis (1a), Volois (1b), Graw (2) and Niks (3). As a trader you will trade with anyone. The cultures also have factories that produce different goods for a higher profit. At the start of the game, all of these tokens will be sitting in your ice-cube tray that you defrosted and dried in preparation.
Before the game starts, Fourteen IOUs are placed at random upside down on each planet. They represent the cultures and players will have to travel to each planet, discover the culture and then decide whether to trade.
The space lanes are filled with asteroids, which are also randomly placed face-down on the designated asteroid squares. An asteroid can be a penalty, a Relic of technology, or a Tele Gate (wormhole). You won't know until someone lands on it.
There are a large handful of bonuses which get put in a (clean, dry) bowl. They can be demands for specific goods at a given culture, putting the price up temporarily, or hitch-hikers trying to get from A to B and willing to pay a fare.
Lastly, you need a flat-bottomed glass to roll the dice in. This is not a game where you want stray dice careering across the board sending spaceships and asteroids flying.

Ready to start. The ships are at Galactic Base. You can see a number of planets with undiscovered culture IOUs and the asteroid field with tokens which could be good news or bad.

Play

Everybody starts at the Galactic Base, in their Scouts, with A$20 per player (e.g. A$60 in a 3-player game).
You have a choice of three directions, so before rolling, state which direction you will go in.
Roll the number of dice your ship is allowed (3 for a Scout) and move that number of coloured dots.
If you hit a penalty oval you lose A$10-40 or can stop there and keep the money.
If you hit a navigation circle, you must pick one of the dice numbers you rolled and go out in the appropriate direction.
If you hit a Tele Gate and another is available, with a number matching a die you rolled, you can teleport to that Tele Gate. This can be a useful short-cut on a trade route.
If you stop on a planet or Space City you can trade with the culture. If you're the first player to arrive, then you discover the culture. You take the IOU token (worth money for trading), and put the relevant culture tokens in place.
If you hit an asteroid you have to flip it over. If it's a penalty, then you can pay up or stop. But if it's a relic you probably want to stop and pick it up.

Relics and Equipment

Relics and Equipment are useful. They might allow you to skip every yellow or red blob (speeding you up), or re-roll a die, or shield you from penalties. Relics can do other things as well. Want to change your number choice going through the navigation circle maze? Take off straight into a Tele Gate? There's relics for that, and more. Plus, a relic doesn't take up hold space. A lucky adventurer working the asteroid field can cover their ship in useful little doodads.

White has discovered the Yxklyx (6). Buy Immortal Grease for A$50 and sell it to the Whynoms (8) on the next planet for A$100

Trade

You've discovered your first culture and having exchanged pleasantries you wish to trade.
First off, you use your IOU and starting cash to buy trade goods to go in your holds.
Then it's off to a destination that hopefully takes that trade good:

And so, a few turns later you arrive at the Zum (7a) culture with two palettes of Rock Videos you bought from the Humans (4b) for A$240.
On arrival you find that there's a Demand for Rock Videos that's put the price up by A$60. So, you sell your first palette A$200+A$60.
You drop the trade good token and the bonus Demand token into the bonus bowl and draw out two tokens. These are then placed on the appropriate culture.
Unfortunately, neither bonus token was a further Demand for Rock Videos so your second palette is worth the basic A$200. You've got A$460 and made a A$220 profit.
The Zum are an industrial culture, so you could choose to spend that profit on a bigger ship, or a Yellow Drive, which will allow you to skip all the yellow blobs from now on, although it will take up half a hold, reducing your carrying capacity.
You decide to do both. Cash in your Scout for A$30 and buy a Transport for A$240, plus a Yellow Drive for A$80. You've got enough money left for two palettes of the Zum's Chicle Liquor (A$40 each). Nearby, another player has discovered the Qossuth (10) who have two Demand tokens for Chicle Liquor.
All you need now is a low-number culture who will buy the Qossuth's Psychotic Sculptures, since the Humans will buy their trade goods (but not those of a 10 culture) and you'll have a nice trade route to exploit.
You can also pick up and set down Fares and sell off unwanted Equipment or Relics as part of your trade turn.
Of course, supply and demand comes into play after a while and a culture can run out of trade goods.

A ludicrously well-appointed Scout ship.
All the Relics are attached to the hull, leaving the hold space for cargo.
Spy Eye: Secretly discover cultures from orbit,without landing on the planet
Mulligan Gear: Roll one of your dice again
Jump Start: Start your turn by jumping to a Tele Gate
Yellow Drive: Avoid all yellow dots when travelling
Switch Switch: Whenever you need to use a navigation number (e.g. Tele Gates), you can pick it from your selection of rolled dice, and not stay on the first number you chose

Factories and Space Stations

These only have use in games with 3 or more players, as a two-player game seldom has overlapping trade routes.
A Factory can be purchased which allows to to generate trade goods and take a percentage on their trade, even if it's not you doing the trading.
Space Stations also generate a percentage for their own, and save the hassle of landing on a planet.

The dice glass (with space sheep motif) and bonus bowl
##Optional Stuff ##
The rules outlined above are simplified considerably. There's all sorts of subtleties

Combat

It is possible to pick fights with other ships and buy weapons. We've never tried combat as the rule book describes it as "less profitable than trading".

The Rastur

According to the Book: "The Rastur represent a species of xenophobic megalomaniacs who are invading the cluster". I.e. for a solo or 2-player game they add complication and more variables.
We haven't got to these either.

Solo mode

Guess what? Nope, not tried this either.
Anyway, this review is long enough already - we can come back to all these another day.

score sheet and map (old version). Red lost this game, but only by A$130

Verdict

This is a fabulous game and one of the few board games we've got which actually has a board.

This game is better than Monopoly because...

• It's got aliens!
• Everyone is in the game to the end - you don't get bankrupted and then wander off in a huff.
• You get to be Captain Kirk and explore new civilisations; boldly going where no-one has gone before.
• Every game is different, due to the random placement of cultures and relics forcing changes in tactics. A Freighter can win by lumbering slowly around a high-profit trade route of nearby cultures, or a Clipper equipped with a relic Red+Yellow Drive might go the length of the board in one turn and win just by operating as a taxi service.
• It's got aliens!
• There's no horse-trading involved so the younger sibling doesn't get stroppy with the elder sibling
• Did I mention that it's got aliens?

The only negative is the time taken to set up and then sort all the tokens out into their respective bags and ice-cube tray compartments at the end. Oh, and you need a snug zip-lock bag for the ice-cube tray so that all the tokens stay in their compartments...
The final domestic innovation, courtesy of Don and Margaret is a sheet of paper for each player, with a simplified map. You can then mark on it the culture numbers to make route plotting easier, and use the blank space to keep a running total of your money, as it's much easier than exchanging bits of paper (unless you're on the second bottle of red, whereupon the mathematics gets tricky).

If you see this original version cheap in a 2nd-hand shop, then buy it. I don't know much about the 2010s remake, but this review on Board Game Geek says it allows for the 'classic' game to be played even though the new 'standard' game drops a couple of (to me) critical components.

End of the Game and time to pack up. Fill that ice cube tray!

Finally, if you have a copy of the game, here's our band-new map-and-scribble sheet. Leave a comment to request a PDF or Word version.