Merchants of Andromeda: Joyful Chaos

I opened the Allplay box after returning from Essen 2025 with that strange feeling you sometimes get when facing a gift you're not sure you deserve. Six boards unfolded on my table like an overly ambitious origami, and I immediately thought: "Reiner Knizia has lost his mind." Because let's be honest, when you know the guy for his streamlined, mathematical designs, seeing his name on a box that overflows like a Christmas drawer feels weird. Yet, after two games that transformed my living room into a space station and my friends into hysterical merchants, I find myself with this irrepressible urge to dive back in while wondering if I'm completely crazy.

Merchants of Andromeda is a three to five player game that lasts between forty-five minutes and an hour and a half, published by Allplay and developed by Robert Hovakimyan. What's fascinating is that this title is a modern redesign of Merchants of Amsterdam, a Reiner Knizia classic released in 2000 with a seventeenth-century Dutch trading theme. Twenty-five years later, Knizia kept the backbone of his original design but launched it into space. Illustrator Torben Bökemeyer dressed it all up in a tongue-in-cheek ultra-capitalist science fiction universe that looks great visually, even if as we'll get to, it's a bit overwhelming. The game says thirteen and up on the box, and frankly, that's spot on.

Five Mini-Games in a Not-So-Distant Galaxy

What immediately strikes you about Merchants of Andromeda is this feeling of landing in a space arcade where every machine demands your attention. Imagine five completely different mini-games spread out before you: a planetary exploration board where you play with memory and luck, a galactic senate where you slip in ballots like conspirators, a defense system against invaders Space Invaders-style but with dice, a large territorial conquest board divided into sectors, and four production tracks that look like Formula 1 races but for resources. Each of these boards operates according to its own rules, creates its own type of tension, generates its own cries of joy or despair around the table.

The exploration board makes you flip tiles one by one while praying not to hit a curse, but even if you get hit with a curse on the very first tile, it's not the end of the world—you still keep something. The senate invites you to vote for candidates who will change the game's scoring rules, creating this political dynamic where you try to guess who's going to win while pushing your own agendas. Space defense has you roll five dice and split them into groups of three and two, with that delicious anxiety of seeing which invaders will advance and where you can place your tokens. The production tracks put you in competition not only against other players on your track, but also against the leaders of the other tracks in a multidimensional race that hurts your brain if you think about it too long.

What's interesting is that these five boards aren't completely isolated from each other. There are a few subtle connections that create links between the different activities. For example, when you progress on the production tracks and reach certain milestones, you unlock the ability to develop zones in the space station. It's not a flood of cascading interactions like in some complex euros, but rather discreet bridges that remind you that all of this takes place in the same universe. These connections are enough to give a certain coherence to the whole without creating endless combo chains that would slow down the pace.

This interconnected mini-game structure gives the game that assumed arcade feel, that sensation of moving from one activity to another without ever really settling into a routine. You don't calculate your moves for three minutes like in Modern Art, you react, you improvise, you play with your gut rather than your head. And that's precisely where the game becomes fascinating or frustrating depending on your temperament.

The Countdown That Drives You Crazy

But the beating heart of Merchants of Andromeda, the one that makes all the difference, is its Dutch auction system coupled with a completely wild card-drawing mechanism. Each turn, the active player becomes the center of attention. They draw three cards one by one from the common deck, and must immediately decide where to place each one before seeing the next. They have three available slots: they can discard a card to get only its resource, they can keep a card to trigger the action of the indicated board, or they can put a card up for auction. It's this third option that triggers the big circus, because the card put up for auction offers its winner the complete combo: the resource AND the board action.

What makes this system nerve-wracking is that you play card by card without knowing what's coming next. You place your first card, then the second, then the third, and each time you wonder if you're screwing up. Should I have saved that card for the auction instead of discarding it for the resource? Am I going to draw something even better in the next two cards? It's a continuous tension that keeps you on edge.

But where it gets really diabolical is with the event cards. At the start of the game, event cards are shuffled into strategic spots in the common deck according to certain distribution rules. These events therefore arrive semi-randomly during the game, creating interruptions that completely change the game's rhythm. When a player draws an event card, boom, we stop everything and trigger either a senatorial vote or an immediate scoring on one of the boards. You thought you still had three turns to develop your space station before scoring? Wrong, the event just dropped and we're counting points now. You planned to vote next turn for the right candidate? Too late, someone drew the vote card and you have to decide right now.

These interruptions create constant unpredictability that prevents any long-term planning. We know which events will happen because they're public at the start of the game, but we never know exactly when. It's like playing chess knowing that at some random moment someone's going to flip the board, but not completely, just enough to mix everything up a bit. Frustrating if you like control, exciting if you like improvisation.

Dutch Auctions

Dutch auctions are the opposite of classic auctions. Instead of starting low and going up, we start at twenty credits, a completely absurd price that no one would ever pay, and the counter gradually drops toward zero. In Merchants of Amsterdam, the original 2000 version, Knizia used a real mechanical clock to create this tension. The problem is that these clocks regularly broke down, turning a central game component into a logistical nightmare. Here, Allplay has modernized the concept with a companion app that does exactly the same job without the mechanical problems. You can also use a simple timer if you prefer. All players place their finger on a phone in the center of the table, and the first to remove their finger wins the auction at the price displayed at that moment. The winner gets both the resource AND the card's action, an often juicy combo, but they pay the price.

Those few seconds where the counter drops from twenty to five create electric tension around the table. The first five seconds mainly serve to build uncertainty: I know what I'd be willing to pay, but would someone else be willing to pay more? Do I remove my finger now or wait a bit longer? And then suddenly someone cracks, removes their finger, and everyone starts complaining because they were about to do it in a second. Or on the contrary, no one moves fast enough and we all end up losing the auction.

This mechanism completely prevents you from doing mathematical calculations during the game. You simply don't have time to pull out your mental calculator to determine the optimal value of an auction because the timer's running, the other players are sweating next to you, and your reptilian brain is screaming "NOW!" while your prefrontal cortex whispers "wait a bit longer." It's this friction between instinct and reason that makes these auctions addictive, even if sometimes you end up paying eighteen credits for a mediocre action just because you panicked.

A Visual Style That Overflows Everywhere

Let's be frank: visually, Merchants of Andromeda is as overloaded as a teenager's desk. Torben Bökemeyer created a tongue-in-cheek capitalist science fiction universe with over eighty unique card illustrations, fake advertisements on the sides of the box, nods to genre classics, political candidates all more improbable than the next with their little backstories. It's colorful, it's detailed, it's full of life, and sometimes the iconography drowns in this visual abundance to the point where you search for information for a few seconds before finding it.

But oddly enough, it fits. This graphic chaos perfectly reflects the chaos of the game itself. We're in a universe of intergalactic merchants fighting for contracts, voting for crooked politicians, exploring trapped planets and repelling invaders while trying to accumulate maximum cash. This isn't an elegant minimalist game, it's an assumed maximalist game, and its aesthetic does justice to this philosophy. The six boards deployed on the table create this impression of a sprawling space station where everything happens at once, where screens blink in all directions, where no one really controls the situation but everyone pretends to.

Yes, it takes a monster amount of table space. Yes, it looks intimidating when you open the box. Yes, it's way too visual for an Allplay game that usually goes for compact and accessible. But this excess is part of the charm, like those restaurants where the portions are so huge you wonder how you'll finish your plate before devouring it all with a smile.

The Identity Split

And this is where Merchants of Andromeda puts me in an uncomfortable position. Because frankly, I don't know who to recommend this game to. It's not a family game in the classic sense: there are six boards, dozens of different cards, intertwining mechanics, a learning curve that requires a good ten minutes of explanation. Families used to Kingdomino or Azul might feel overwhelmed by the amount of information to manage. But it's not an expert game either: choices are often intuitive rather than calculated, randomness plays an important role, you can't really build a complex long-term strategy because events and auctions constantly change the deal.

It's a difficult in-between to position, a game that falls into a gray zone between family and enthusiast. Too many rules for some, not enough strategic depth for others. If you bring this game to a table of analytical players who like to calculate their moves three turns ahead, you're headed for a massacre. The game will drag on for two hours because they'll try to do math on every auction, and they'll end up frustrated because you can't really optimize in Merchants of Andromeda. Conversely, if you bring it to completely novice players, they might feel lost for the first fifteen minutes before understanding the rhythm.

The ideal player for Merchants of Andromeda is the one who plays with their heart rather than their head, the one who's capable of letting go and enjoying the moment without constantly wondering if they're making the optimal choice. It's the player who will laugh when they flip three cursed tiles in a row on the exploration board, who will get angry with good humor when someone steals the auction they coveted, who will conspire loudly to get such and such senator elected even if it serves absolutely no purpose to say it out loud. If you're this kind of player, Merchants of Andromeda will give you an hour and a half of pure chaotic happiness. If you're someone who needs control and predictability in their games, move along.

The All-or-Nothing Effect

What fascinates me most about this game is this deep ambivalence I feel with each play. On one hand, I'm dying to play it again. The excitement of the auctions, the variety of boards, the moments of triumph when you snag exactly what you wanted at the right price, the laughter around the table when someone gets caught by a surprise event. Merchants of Andromeda creates a joyful and chaotic atmosphere that's frankly addictive. It's a good-natured game where no one really plays seriously, where you accept getting rolled because it's funny, where victory matters less than the anecdotes you'll tell afterward.

But on the other hand, I have this persistent doubt. Is this game really good or am I being fooled by the atmosphere? Do my choices really matter or am I just reacting to a cascade of random events? Will others hook in like me or will they find it messy and superficial? It's a game that divides, I'm convinced. There's something deeply polarizing in its design, something that will make you love it or hate it depending on the player's profile.

This uncertainty about public reception gives me the impression of facing a gamble. Merchants of Andromeda isn't a consensus game that will please everyone in an average way. It's a game that will provoke strong reactions, one way or another. Either people will get on board with the madness and have a great time, or they'll frown wondering where the strategy is and why everything's so disorganized. There's no real middle ground possible.

And paradoxically, that might be what makes the game strong. In a market saturated with smooth, balanced designs aiming for maximum audience, Merchants of Andromeda fully assumes its chaotic and polarizing nature. Robert Hovakimyan and Reiner Knizia didn't try to smooth out the rough edges, to make the game more consensual, to please everyone. They created something singular that asks the player to adapt rather than the reverse. It's refreshing, even if it's risky.

Learning to Let Go of the Wheel

The big lesson Merchants of Andromeda taught me is that you have to accept not controlling everything. In many modern games, you patiently build your engine, optimize your actions, plan several turns ahead. Here, impossible. Auctions create constant chaos that reshuffles the cards every turn. Events trigger scorings or votes when you least expect it. Dice decide which invaders advance. Exploration tiles reveal in random order. You can certainly have a general direction, try to focus on certain boards rather than others, but the execution feels more like surfing than driving a car.

This necessity to let go can be frustrating at first, especially for those of us who like to feel in control of the situation. But once you accept this philosophy, once you understand that the game asks you to react rather than plan, something magical happens. You stop wondering if you're making the right choice and start making choices that feel right in the moment. You stop calculating the exact value of an auction and remove your finger when your instinct tells you. You stop planning your voting strategy and support the candidate who makes you laugh.

It's a different form of play, more improvised, more jazz than classical. Merchants of Andromeda rewards adaptability and intuition rather than analysis and optimization. For some players, it'll be liberating. For others, it'll be unbearable. Personally, I find it fascinating, even if I must admit that after a game I'm never completely sure if I played correctly or simply got lucky.

The Skeptical Merchant's Verdict

So here's where I stand after several plays: I love Merchants of Andromeda while acknowledging it has half a dozen obvious flaws. It takes too much table space. It's inelegant to explain. It looks more intimidating than it really is. Its graphic style is so loaded that the iconography sometimes gets lost in the visual noise. Event interruptions break the rhythm to the point where you sometimes forget what you were doing. And above all, it occupies that difficult gray zone between family and enthusiast that will make recommendations complicated.

But frankly, I don't care. What matters to me is that each game gives me that particular thrill that few games manage to create. That tension during auctions where everyone holds their breath staring at the timer. Those moments of pure joy when you explore a planet and hit just the right tiles. Those animated discussions during senatorial votes where everyone tries to convince others that their candidate is the best. Those laughs when someone gets caught by a surprise event and the whole table shifts.

Merchants of Andromeda isn't a technical masterpiece. It's not the most balanced, the most elegant, the most refined game of the year. But it's a game that creates emotion, that generates anecdotes, that transforms an ordinary evening into a memorable one. It's an imperfect game that I want to bring out regularly, which is ultimately the best compliment I can give it.

Will it become a classic? I doubt it. Will it please everyone? Certainly not. Would I recommend it without hesitation? It really depends on the person in front of me. But do I have a great time every time I play it? Absolutely. And in the end, that's perhaps the only question that really matters.

My rating: 7.5/10

A chaotic, polarizing, imperfect, and absolutely irresistible game for those who accept letting go and enjoying the ride. If you're the kind of player who needs to calculate and optimize, move along. But if you're looking for an hour and a half of galactic arcade where auctions make you sweat and where each board brings its share of surprises, Merchants of Andromeda will delight you. It's the kind of game you can't really defend rationally but can't help loving viscerally. An assumed all-or-nothing that deserves a detour for fans of strong gaming sensations.