Dale of Merchants 10th Anniversary Pre-Review – A Decade of Evolution

Disclaimer: A prototype of Dale of Merchants 10th Anniversary Edition provided for free by Snowdale Design, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since the release of Dale of Merchants. It still holds a special place for me, as it was one of the first times I branched out from the usual recommended lists and Board Game Geek’s Top 10 and picked up a relatively unknown game.

Fortunately for me, it kicked a lot of butt.

Even more fortunately, I was able to establish a working relationship with the mastermind behind it all, Sami Laakso. You can even read an interview I did with him several years ago, where we talked about this very game. Now, 10 years on, I’ve managed to get my hands on the Dale of Merchants 10th Anniversary Prototype, and let me tell you, this is shaping up to be the best edition yet.

New to Dale of Merchants? Start Here.

Head over to my Dale of Merchants review for a full overview of gameplay and whether it’s the right game for your table.

So, what’s actually new?

The 10th Anniversary Edition includes six different Dale of Merchants games, each fully playable by itself, with its own market board, rulebook and six Animalfolk decks to mix and match.

Of course, the real appeal of the Anniversary Edition is the included storage solution that allows you to combine all six versions in one box. So rather than digging through your shelves trying to remember which box has which deck, you’ve now got the entire Dale of Merchants collection in one place. Just pull it off the shelf, pick your decks and get playing.

The Animalfolk themselves are mostly returning faces, although they’ve received some significant tender love and care. Some have updated balance and ability changes, others have received new artwork, and all of them now use the terminology and iconography Snowdale Design has developed and curated over the last decade.

Then there’s the Eurasian Beavers, which were previously available as a separate mini-expansion. They weren’t exactly the easiest deck to track down back in the day, and paying international shipping for a single deck was a tough pill to swallow. Them being included in Dale of Merchants 5 is a very welcome addition.

And that’s not all. There are nine brand-new Animalfolk decks, bringing the total number in the collection to 36. Considering each game asks you to choose only a selection of decks before you start, that’s a ridiculous amount of variety. You could play Dale of Merchants for a very, very long time before running out of combinations to try.

Here’s a breakdown of the Animalfolk included:

There’s also an added Solo mode, which I won’t cover in this preview, but it’s cool that it’s there. So now even Nigel No-Friends (I’m kidding don’t @ me) can enjoy a game of Dale of Merchants.

A Decade of Improvements

Outside of the new Animalfolk factions, which we’ll get into in a bit, almost every other card has been redesigned around new terminology and iconography. Each of the different areas of the board now has a specific name that can be referenced on cards. This cleans up a lot of the language and lets the cards explain a lot with a few words.

It’s like Kevin in The Office said: “Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.”

The new iconography helps here as well, with new icons for different abilities as well as an updated icon for the additional action. That one was well needed, as too often you’d assume you got a second move from a technique, even when you didn’t. The new icon is much more prominent and stylised, fitting into the game’s aesthetic.

The real benefit of these changes became apparent after playing multiple times with different Animalfolk decks. We were able to swap decks in and out and only needed to refer to the back of the relevant rulebook, which contains all the new keywords. It made it much easier to understand how the different decks worked without constantly having to dig through the rules.

Alongside the updated icons and wording, the team has also gone back and updated the artwork. Now, not all of this was completed in my prototype copy, and I’ll admit I was a little worried when I first heard about the changes. The artwork does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to showcasing the different personalities of the Animalfolk, so changing it could have easily gone wrong.

Thankfully, the new artwork doesn’t lose that feel. Instead, it’s like putting on the right pair of prescription glasses, where the Animalfolk look much the same but now a little bit clearer, the colours are a little more vibrant, and everything is a little more focused in what they’re trying to portray. It’s a solid improvement so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of it in the finished product.

The new storage solution is also a step in the right direction. The upright storage for each of the different versions, means these boxes can hold a ridiculous number of cards. So even if you don’t end up picking up everything from the crowdfunding campaign, you’ll still be able to fit several titles into a single box, reducing the amount of shelf space the game takes up.

The all-in storage solution continues that minimalist approach, shrinking the box down from the Collector’s Edition. It’s missing the custom inserts, instead opting for simple gaps between the cards for storage.

Finally, some of the cards have also been rebalanced. I read through the rather lengthy list of changes, but after actually playing with them, I realised something pretty quickly: I haven’t played enough Dale of Merchants to know what’s changed.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I’d much rather admit that than pretend I could identify the subtle balance changes after a handful of games. I trust Sami and the team to know what they’re doing here, and I’m sure the more competitive Dale of Merchants players out there will appreciate the work that’s gone into tightening up the decks.

Three Decks, Three Very Different Games

Running through all the different versions of Dale of Merchants was a fun journey down memory lane. What really stood out to me, though, was how much my tastes have changed. When I originally played the first Dale of Merchants, almost a decade ago, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. These days, though, it felt a little too mild-mannered for my tastes.

That doesn’t mean the original game doesn’t hold up. If you’re new to deck building or the Dale of Merchants series, it still works as a fantastic introduction to this market race. But for me, the further we got into the series, the more interesting the different Animalfolk mechanics became. By the time we played our last game, I was still confident that Dale of Merchants is one of the best deck building games out there.

It hits a really nice balance between interactivity, complexity and speed of play. And if it doesn’t quite hit those marks for you, there’s so much variety between the Animalfolk decks that you can tailor the experience to the sort of game you’re after.

But that’s not what we did.

We just chopped and changed different Animalfolk decks and played a whole suite of games, which made each game feel very distinctive from the last.

I’ve already talked about using the original decks from Dale of Merchants 1. The race to build eight stacks felt steady. There wasn’t too much excitement in the individual actions, but there was a satisfying feeling of earning small wins through efficient play. This felt like the baseline Dale of Merchants experience.

Then we played with the Snow Monkeys, one of the new Animalfolk, and the game flipped on its head.

Normally, you’re looking to get rid of junk cards from your deck. The Snow Monkeys, however, actively want you to collect as much junk as possible, because you can turn that junk into something much more useful. It completely messed with my usual approach to playing Dale of Merchants, forcing me to rethink what I actually wanted in my deck.

Then we played with the Golden-Bellied Capuchins, who introduced gold coins as a secondary currency. Once again, I had to go back to the drawing board and figure out how I wanted to play. These cheeky monkeys also bring a lot more interaction with the other players, including ways to steal and give coins. So, once again, it felt completely different from the game we’d just played.

Our last game included the Walruses, and they might just be my favourite deck so far. They gave me a lot more flexibility when building my stacks, which made the whole game feel much more freeing than the previous games.

Anyone who’s played Dale of Merchants before won’t be surprised by how much the Animalfolk can change the game. What did surprise me was how consistently fun they were. No matter which decks we played with, there was always some new curveball waiting for us, and we knew we’d have fun figuring it out.

That’s just three of the nine new Animalfolk, but they all impressed me, with the exception of the Dodos, which aren’t quite finished just yet.

There is still a mountain of work to do on the prototype, but from everything I’ve seen this one is heading in the right direction. Whether you’re a newcomer to the series wanting to find out what all the fuss is about, or an old hand looking for the most complete version of Dale of Merchants, the 10th Anniversary Edition is shaping up to be the best version of the game yet. Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on the finished copy.

You can get your very own copy of this special Anniversary Edition by heading over to the Gamefound page.