Merchant of Death

Theme: As the leader of your country’s secret service, you must stop the infamous Merchant of Death, international arms dealer, as he sells his weapons of destruction in war-torn and drug-ridden countries. Will your agents succeed and bring the Merchant of Death to justice? Overview: The object of Merchant of Death is to confiscate more crates of weapons than your opponents. You confiscate weapons by "deploying" Agents into one of the three locations (North Africa, Central America, Middle East) or in pursuit of the Merchant of Death. During the game, in each of the three locations, crates of weapons will be shipped. By the end of the game, there will usually be more weapons in some locations than others. If you have the most agents in a location at game's end, you will win the greatest share of the weapons there. Thus, as the game progresses, you will want to send more agents into locations with more weapons or (by special powers described later) divert weapons into locations where you have more agents. Game Play: Players each have a deck of 12 Deployment Cards of one color. The cards are equally divided into values of 1, 2, and 3 Agents per card. 3 Location Boards are placed in a coloumn on the table, underneath the Merchant of Death Board. On your turn, you do two things in either order: (1) Play a Deployment Card and (2) Play a Special Agent Card. The Deployment Cards are played from your hand of 2 cards (which is the set hand limit for Deployment cards in your hand). The Special Agent Cards are in a deck on the table, with two of them exposed. You play a Deployment Card from your hand by placing it next to a Location Board to "deploy" the number of Agents to that Location. For example, you may play a 3 Deployment Card (worth 3 Agents) to the Middle East. You can play it "Undercover" (face-down) or "Exposed" (face-up) based upon strategies that become apparent as you play the game. You can also Deploy Agents to pursue the Merchant of Death by placing it next to the Merchant of Death board. This gives you the special power to deliver weapons to 1 of the 3 locations. More on delivering weapons below. You play a Special Agent card by taking 1 of the 2 Special Agent cards that are face up on the table. In addition, each time a player uses a Special Agent card, a crate of weapons is given to the Merchant of Death. As previously mentioned, the weapons are then delivered from the Merchant of Death to a location(s) whenever anyone places an Agent to pursue the Merchant of Death. The Special Agents add interesting twists to the game by giving the player the power to do such things as kill another agent ("Assassin"), protect oneself from an assassin ("Bodyguard"), confiscate a crate of weapons ("Raider"), redeploy an Agent ("Director"), and a few others. When one of the locations has 25 crates of weapons, the game ends. For each location, there is scoring based upon the number of agents players have there, both exposed and undercover.