The Guild of Merchant Explorers Board Game

🏆 2023 Bulgarian Board Game Awards International Game of the Year Winner

⭐️ 2023 Bulgarian Board Game Awards International Game of the Year Nominee

⭐️ 2023 American Tabletop Strategy Games Recommended

⭐️ 2022 Golden Geek Medium Game of the Year Nominee

About the Game

The Queen has sent out a call to The Guild of Merchant Explorers, asking brave adventurers to voyage to all corners of the kingdom of Tigomé.

While the kingdom is flourishing, its maps have not been updated in some time and its great cities have lost contact with one another. With your team of explorers, you will journey over rough seas, majestic mountains, vast deserts, and lush grasslands to establish trade routes between cities, visit far-seeing discovery towers, and discover new villages that have emerged.

In The Guild of Merchant Explorers, each player starts with one city on their personal map board.

Shuffle the deck of terrain cards, then reveal most of these cards one by one. Based on the terrain revealed, each player places on their board cubes that are connected to their starting city or other cubes. You want to complete areas on your board, cross the seas to new land, and establish new cities on the board. You can explore capsized ships for treasure — which gives you special placement capabilities — and create linked connections between locations to score bonus points. Common objectives can be completed by all players, with those who complete it first scoring more points.

At the end of a round, all cubes are removed from each board, leaving only the cities behind, so if you don't establish new cities, you'll be stuck in the same places.

The Guild of Merchant Explorers contains multiple copies of four different maps, and the game is designed so that you can play remotely with one or more copies.

Watch Jamey Stegmaier’s discuss his favourite mechanism in The Guild of Merchant Explorers on YouTube!

About the Designers

Australian born Matthew Dunstan lived in the UK and Prague for the best part of the last decade before moving back to Australia where he now resides. To date he has had over 30 games published and distributed all around the world, with hundreds of thousands of copies sold in over 8 languages. Notable titles include the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated Elysium, the Spiel des Jahres-nominated Next Station: London, Monumental and the Adventure Game series.

Brett J. Gilbert studied Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge University, and has worked in design management roles within both educational publishing and the online retail industry. After discovering modern board games and the vibrant UK design community, Brett became a professional board game designer, and now has a large catalogue of published games, including Divinare and Elysium, both recognised by the Spiel des Jahres jury.