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Merchants & Marauders

2-4 players 180-180 min 7.4 Board Game Geek Rating

Players captain Caribbean vessels during the Golden Age of Piracy, choosing between merchant trading or piracy. Victory requires accumulating 10 glory points through completing missions, defeating enemies, amassing gold, epic plundering, or purchasing grand ships. Both paths involve significant risks—pirates face bounties and port restrictions while merchants sacrifice combat power for cargo space.

Published 2010

Merchants & Marauders

Get Ready

Setup the game with these step-by-step instructions before diving into your turn.

1
Prepare merchant ship cards
Shuffle the six merchant ship profile cards (ranging from small vessels with 5 gold to large ships with 20 gold) into a draw pile
2
Note ship statistics
Each merchant ship has Seamanship (1-2), Leadership (1), Maneuver (1-2), Toughness (1-4), Cargo (2-5), Crew (1-3), Cannons (0-2), and Gold (5-20) values

On Your Turn

What you can do during your turn.

1
Scout for targets
Perform a scouting action as normal to locate merchant ships
2
Draw merchant ship
If scouting is successful, draw a Merchant Ship card and allocate nationality as normal
3
Decide to attack
Choose whether to attack the merchant or let them pass; if no attack, the action ends with nothing further happening
4
Initiate combat
If attacking, fight a normal NPC combat with the following exceptions:
5
Avoid sinking
If the merchant ship sinks, all cargo and gold is lost
6
Collect plunder
If you win, draw the gold and cargo cards indicated on the Merchant Ship profile, minus any cargo destroyed in the fight
7
Ignore cargo card values
The gold and damage shown on cargo cards is ignored using these rules
8
No capture allowed
You cannot capture a merchant ship; only plunder it

Winning

How to claim victory.

1
Earn Glory points
Collecting 12 or more gold from a single merchant raid earns one Glory point
2
Maximize rewards
Target higher-value merchant ships (Gold 12, 15, or 20) to guarantee Glory points from successful raids

watch & Learn

Let the pros teach you with these top videos.

How To Setup And Play Merchants & Marauders

How To Setup And Play Merchants & Marauders

Instructional

Korsaren der Karibik + Ruhmreiche See - immer noch so gut?

Korsaren der Karibik + Ruhmreiche See - immer noch so gut?

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FULL rules

Looking for the full details? Grab the complete rulebook as a downloadable PDF.

PDF RULEBOOK

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