Guild of the Merchant Explorers Notes

Three takeaways from Guild of Merchant Explorers:

Simultaneous play is great. It facilitates not co-opting strategies, speeds the game along, and enables that shared experience as well as 'my own little world'. If it were somehow cooperative or at east self-competing, it could definitely be a good gateway into solo play boardgames.
You get more powerful as the game goes on. The addition of era cards that play out each round is good power scaling and makes me think about skills as the advantage of scars for the brainstorming I'm doing.
The competing merchants theme creates lots of story fodder as a backdrop for other games: maps that are not accurate to where towns are, where treasure is, where trade routes exist. New villages settled and ruins discovered as news coming back to the core of the region. Opportunities to contract with competing merchant guilds.