Turn the biggest profit as you deliver goods across a mysterious star cluster.
Merchant of Venus is a science fiction tabletop game created by Richard Hamblen and first published in 1988 by Avalon Hill. In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games released a second edition.
Players take on the roles of space traders chasing wealth and fortune, moving their ships through interconnected systems on a fixed map, discovering new alien worlds to trade with. As players start to make money delivering commodities, their earnings can be used to purchase equipment and construct their own infrastructure. The player who first acquires enough total value in cash and port/factory deeds wins the game.
This show provides examples of:
- Casual Interstellar Travel: Players discover civilizations in an unexplored part of the galaxy, and buy and sell goods
- Hyperspace Lanes: Travel goes along hyperspace lanes (unless one manages to find usable jumpgates). Finding routes (successions of systems) that allow for especially lucrative voyages is a main key to success.
- Punny Name: The name is a play on the name of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
- Single-Biome Planet: The game has a Desert Planet, an Ice Planet, a Water World, and a Jungle World.
