Merv

7th September 2021

Tuesday evening is here and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.

The first game of the night was Merv.

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What's in a game?

• Game board: Merv is a busy game and consequently has a busy board loaded with information, spaces and tracks!
  City: The central part of the board is dominated by a 5x5 grid, this is the city of Merv. The grid is considered to have a north, east, south and west side. It's also surrounded by 'wall spaces'.
  Caravansary: This is a 'caravan of camels' where players can go to buy spice.
  Influence track: As players complete certain actions, they move along this track which allows them to acquire different types of spice.
  Library: This is where players can acquire scrolls and as they do so, they will also acquire benefits or bonuses called breakthroughs.
  Marketplace: Players can travel to other settlements to buy various goods. The marketplace contains 4 inner cities and 4 outer cities.
  Mosque: Players can move along this track to acquire benefits and bonuses.
  Palace: Players can send courtiers to the palace to earn victory points - at a cost.
  Favour track: Used in conjunction with the Palace.
• City tiles: These are used in the city.
  Camel market: This double-sided tile sits in the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Building sites: There are 24 of these other tiles that populate the rest of the city. Players will be able to construct buildings on these sites.
  When activated, building sites provide resource cubes in their colours as well as 1 of 6 actions.
• Caravan cards: This deck of cards is used to represent the 4 different types of spice available to purchase, however the distribution of spices is not equal on the cards, some are rarer. From most common to rare, they are; cinnamon, ginger, juniper & pepper. Caravan cards confer 2 bonuses'
  Doubles: Whenever a player completes a pair, they get a bonus depending on what type of spice it is.
  Set collecting: During the endgame, sets of cards score victory points.
• Contract cards: These represent business or trade contracts which players can complete for victory points and other rewards.
  Completing a contract usually requires a mixture of resources, goods and scrolls. Players will also require a minimum level of influence in order to complete contracts.
  Unusually, goods and contracts are not spent when completing a contract, they are simply placed on the card, which prevents them being used for other contracts.
  There are 6 types of contract card.
• Goods tiles: There 24 common and 24 rare goods tiles.
• Scroll tiles: These represent the world of academia in Merv
• Breakthrough tiles: Earn enough scroll tiles and a player will acquire a breakthrough tile, these tiles confer a bonus or benefit of some kind.
• Upgrade tiles: Used to upgrade buildings that are constructed.
• Scoring tiles: These score points at the end of every year and are acquired from the mosque track.
• Camel meeples: Wooden meeples.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes, now you're talking. They come in 5 colours and represent the game's 4 different types of errr resources? The white cubes are considered wild.
• Wall tokens: These wooden tokens are shaped in the style of city walls.
• Buildings: There are 9 each of these wooden tokens in each of the 4 player colours.
• Wooden disks: Merv has a lot of tracks that need tracking and wooden disks are used to track those tracks! There are 10 in each colour.
• Meeples: Each player gets a Master Meeple and 8 worker meeples in their colour.

Merv has top-notch components; the cards and tiles are all good quality. cubes, tokens and meeples all look good, made of wood and feel solid, the walls are the standout components here and really look nice when set on the on the board and surrounding the city.
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Despite its busyness, the game board is well illustrated and colourful, artwork on cards is also clear and colourful.

For the most part the iconography is clear and easy to understand.
Unfortunately, this does not extend to the symbols used to represent the game's 6 actions, these were a constant source of confusion and error.

​For example; the mosque action uses a minaret symbol but actually involves moving camel meeples along a track, but the symbols with camels on it is used to represent the caravansary! Why? Because the caravansary used camels to move spices! However, in game, the caravansary action only is used to get spices and has nothing to do with camels
This means that camels are used to represent spices and minarets are used to represent camels! It verges on the ridiculous.
It didn't help that all 6 symbols were the same colour so that it matched the colour theme of the board.

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How's it play?
Setup

• City: Randomly choose one side of the camel market tile and place it at the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Shuffle all of the build site tiles and randomly place them in the city, filling out all 24 spaces.
• Caravansary: shuffle the caravan cards into a face-down deck.
  Draw 8 cards and place them face-up in a row along the edge of the board close to the caravansary space. Then place camels on cards according to the number of players.
• Contract cards: Put the contract cards face-up into their 6 respective decks with the highest value card at the top and in descending order, making the earlier contracts more valuable.
• Library: Place the scroll and breakthrough tokens on their Library spaces.
• Mosque: The upgrade tokens go on to the mosque track, as do 4 camel meeples.
• Marketplace: Place a camel meeple on each of the 4 inner cities in the marketplace.
• Tokens: Give each player their meeples, disks and building tokens.
• Player order: Determine starting player.

I'm sure I've missed some steps, but it's pretty much covered.

On to play
Merv is played over 3 years and in each year there are 4 rounds, players have 1 action per round, thus 12 actions in total.
Taking actions in Merv are quite unusual, play takes place around the 5x5 grid and each round takes place across 1 side of the grid (Starting on the north side.), then in the subsequent round, play moves clockwise to the next side of the grid and so on, so by the 4th round, a complete circuit will have been completed.

• Place meeple: When a player takes their turn, they place their Master Meeple on one of the 5 spaces on the currently active side of the grid and activates one of the 5 building sites in that column/row. When this happens, the following occurs.
  Build: If there is no building on the activated site, then the active player must put one of their buildings there.
  Resources: The active player gains a resource in the colour indicated on the site they activated, furthermore they also gain resources from any sites of the same colour in the same column/row, provided those sites also have buildings. Thus it pays to position buildings in certain ways over turns to be able to generate multiple resources at a time as the game progresses.
  If those buildings belong to other players, then those players additionally acquire resources.
  Then one of the following is chosen.
  Deploy soldier: The active player may place one of their soldiers on to a tile with a building that is not already protected, this protects the building and earns them influence. What is protection for? More on this later.
  Gain favour: Move a space along the favour track at the palace.
  Action: The player use the action on the activated site, actions are the main staple of Merv and players will be using them most of the time.
  Camel market: If the active player has chosen the middle space of the 5, then they can access the camel market tile. The active player may use one of the tiles 4 special abilities by placing a camel meeple on the abilities' space, alternatively, they may collect all the camel meeples previously placed on the camel market tile.
• Actions: There are 6 types of action in Merv.
  Caravansary: This action allows the active player to purchase caravan cards by spending resource cubes, they will also acquire camel meeples if they're on the purchased caravan card.
  Caravan cards come in 4 types, the number of different types a player can hold at any time depends on how far they've travelled along the influence track.
  Every pair of caravan cards earns the player a bonus and sets earn victory points at the end of the game.
  Library: When a player takes the library action, they can spend resources to purchase scrolls. For every 2 scrolls a player acquires, they also acquire a breakthrough.
  Scrolls also have uses elsewhere.
  Marketplace: This grants the active player access to the marketplace which consists of 8 cities, this requires establishing a camp in one of the 4 inner cities. The first player to do this acquires the camel on the city.
  Once a camp has been built, the player can spend resources to buy goods from that city, they may also buy goods from adjacent cities by spending the required goods and a camel meeple. In later actions the player can expand their network of camps and thus do away with the need to spend camels to reach those cities.
  Camels spent this way are placed on caravan cards in the caravansary.
  Mosque: There are 4 camel meeples on the mosque track and taking this action allows the active player to move them. They may move as far as they want, provided they can pay the cost in resource cubes for each move. Every time a player advances along the track, it earns them a bonus; this might be a building upgrade, scoring upgrade and so on.
  Palace: The palace consists of 2 elements; the 4 halls and the favour track.
  Moving up the favour track scores victory points for the active player.
  Each of the 4 halls has 3 spaces and a cost, paying the associated cost allows the player to place meeples in these halls, which will score the player victory points at the end of every year for either scrolls, spices, good or buildings on mosque building sites. Points are earned by spending the advancements made on the favour track.
  Wall: This action allows the active player to build walls around the 5x5 grid, they can build as many segments in action as they can afford in resource points.
  Walls provide protection to the buildings they shield and also earn the player influence.
• Complete contract: If a player has the required mix of influence, resources cubes, goods, spices and scrolls, they may complete a contract in their turn and immediately score the contract's victory points.
  Completing a contract generally requires multiple actions, fortunately completing a contract itself is a free action.
• End of round: At the end of the round a new turn order may be established for the following round.
• End of year: Once the 4th round has been completed, the year has reached its end, but it's not quite over. There are still a couple matters to conclude.
  Invasion: In years 2 & 3, the Mongol horde invades and every unprotected building is destroyed! Although players may bribe the Mongols to leave a building alone with a resource cube matching the site's colour.
  End of year scoring: At the end of each year players score points, these come from several sources.
  Buildings: Each building scores the player a point.
  Scoring tiles: Scoring tiles acquired from the mosque track score points.

Endgame
Once the 3rd year is over and has been scored, there is there final scoring to calculate.
Sets of caravan cards score points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
Merv has several approaches to acquiring victory points but resource cubes is key to nearly all of them and the resource cube economy is very important. Acquiring cubes may conflict with choosing actions if the building site a player wants to activate produces cubes of a different colour, players will have to make choices and adapt.
Having said that, it pays to diversify but it also pays to pursue one one strategy such as the caravansary or mosque track.
Completing contracts feels like more of a bonus for sharp-eyed players than a long-term approach.
Players also need to consider palace actions, placing workers into the right spaces in halls and moving along the favour track can be a good source of points.

Players will need to also look towards defending Merv from attackers, losing buildings also loses the ability to gain resource cubes in later turns and of course loses victory points for the affected player(s).

Merv is definitely on the heavier side of board games, but to be honest it didn't feel deep, just fiddly.
I never got the feeling that I was making clever plays, instead I got the feeling that Merv was a heavy game made for the sake of being a heavy game.
When I took an action, it often felt like I was doing 2 half actions instead of 1 whole one and it took multiple different actions to achieve something.

E.g., I would undertake the marketplace action and acquire a good, Was I able to sell that good? No!
What about spices, what if I'd acquired spices? Can't sell them either.
To sell something, that is to complete a contract, I needed influence, which earned by building walls and also scrolls, which are acquired by visiting the library. Of course I also needed resources cubes.
​I know that some people will love this idea but I found it unengaging and a little dull and verging on tedious. Merv feels a little dry, unexciting and detached.