The Guild of Merchant Explorers

Objective and flow: Explore a personal map over four eras, founding villages, completing city connections, visiting ruins and discovery spaces, and collecting coins. The exploration deck determines the turns in an era. Each time a card is revealed, every player simultaneously places explorers according to the same action. After the fourth era, the player with the most coins wins. Map layouts and era cards create different route opportunities, so players balance expansion, rewards, and future space.

Setup: Each player chooses a map and takes matching village markers and explorers. Place the Exploration Board, era cards, exploration cards, Investigate cards, Treasure cards, discovery towers, trading posts, coins, and other markers within reach. Prepare goal cards for the selected map and build the Era I exploration deck as instructed. AEG recommends Avenia for a first game; other maps use different terrain and spatial layouts.

Exploration cards and simultaneous turns: One player reveals an exploration card and places it on the matching space of the Exploration Board. All players inspect the same card and resolve its exploration action on their own map at the same time. A card may require explorers of a specified terrain, adjacent spaces, or a straight line of sea spaces. Place explorers one by one and resolve map rewards as soon as they are triggered, without waiting for the entire action to finish.

Golden rules of exploration: Each new explorer must be adjacent to one of your villages, your capital, or explorers; the capital remains a starting point in every era. Explorers must go on legal open spaces and cannot cover villages or discovery towers. Place as many explorers as the action allows while following all terrain and arrangement requirements. You may choose to place fewer, but unused placements cannot be saved for a later turn.

Terrain and routes: Maps show grassland, desert, mountain, and sea. Basic explore cards restrict which terrain or arrangement is allowed; for example, a sea action may require a straight line, while an any-adjacent-space action may cross terrain types. The capital and each village can serve as a starting point. Once you discover a village, you can explore from it later even if it is not connected to your current explorers. Permanent villages remain usable as starting points in every later era.

Villages and cities: When you explore every space in a connected land region during one era, including its city spaces, you must replace one explorer with a village marker. The village must go on a blank space, and a region can contain only one village. Earn the number of coins shown for that village in the map’s score area for the current era. A network of explorers, villages, and the capital that connects two cities between two cities without trading posts must score their values multiplied together, then place a trading post on one city; a city with a trading post cannot score another route. Villages remain for the rest of the game and extend future routes.

Coins, ruins, and discovery towers: Coin spaces award the number shown. Exploring a ruin draws a Treasure card, which may have an immediate effect or provide an endgame reward; a marked ruin normally does not yield another new treasure when explored again. When you explore a discovery space, return the explorer to your supply, place a discovery tower, and earn coins according to the map. A built tower remains and cannot be explored again. Trading posts, villages, and other spaces resolve using the rules for that map or card.

Era cards and Investigate cards: The exploration deck expands over the eras. The first time an era card appears, each player draws two Investigate cards, chooses one, and resolves its special explore action. Place the chosen card in the matching era position and use it again when the corresponding era card appears later. In Era IV, a wild era card lets you reuse one of the Investigate actions already chosen. These cards add route options but never override the Golden Rules of exploration.

End of an era: When the exploration deck is empty, the era ends. Return all explorers from your map to your personal supply. Villages, trading posts, treasure markers, and discovery towers stay in place. Build the next era’s exploration deck using the corresponding era cards and the basic explore cards. Permanent nodes let you start the next era from a new village, so each era can establish another network instead of treating explorers as permanent roads.

Endgame and solo scope: After the final exploration deck is exhausted in Era IV, compare the coins collected; the player with the most wins; ties go to more discovery towers, then more villages, then a shared victory. The official AEG page lists 1–4 players and notes solo-mode era markers. This entry summarizes the shared exploration procedure rather than the solo challenge’s separate scoring. AEG’s Queen’s Special Orders and Party Pack are separate expansions; their maps and player-count rules are not part of the base game.