Merchants Cove Character Overview: The Oracle - with Mike DiLisio

[Music] hey there everybody it's mike delecio and today i'm going to be doing one of a series of videos where i'm covering all of the characters in merchants cove this includes the base game characters and the three expansion characters as well i'm also going to talk a bit about the secret stash expansion what i'm planning to do is give you a brief overview of how these characters play then afterwards i'll talk to you about what their level of complexity is ranked among all of the characters within the game the main mechanisms that run those characters and all of this is going to culminate in a video where i'm going to rank all of the merchants cove characters in the order of my preference so without further ado let's take a look at today's character all right so let's talk about the oracle character in merchants cove here are the components that you'll find within this box you've got the main player board and this is a dry erase board because the kind of central mechanism for the oracle character is a bit of a roll and write or at least a kind of a riff on a roll and write so you've got the main player board there you've got the dry erase marker that goes along with that alright you also have your sail shelf this is just kind of for fun you can place your goods and there are the goods large and small of the four different colors onto that and then here you've got the divining dish and the five runes that are contained within and these are what you're actually rolling all right and so you see here you've got a coin that coin is actually two-sided on one side you've got a tree the other side you've got a skull there that represents corruption you've got that that coin you've got the voodoo doll you've got one d4 there you've got a second d4 there and you've got a bone all right and these are just things that i had kind of thrown in there randomly at the beginning of this filming now during setup if you actually roll all of them into one side only of the divining dish you can re-roll them but that is not the case in the regular or after you get past setup normally what happens after past setup is that if they're all rolled into one side you have to take a corruption card all right so that's not necessarily something you want to do most of the actions on the board are going to require a particular combination of runes on one side of the dish or others so let's talk about those different actions that you can take i do want to point out that the little figure here of hagatha the oracle uh this one i had painted these do not come painted uh but uh chris yee's wife wendy did a fantastic job on these so i figured why not show those off the ones that you get in the box are unpainted all right so the different actions that you can take first of all let's talk about this twisting fates area if you come here that's going to cost you one time and depending upon what side of the face of the coin is showing it's also going to make some determination so in this case as i showed you before the corruption side is showing so to take this action right now since that side is showing i would have to take a corruption card but what you're going to do is you are going to look at which of the other runes are in that side with the coin so in this case the voodoo doll and one of the d4s are there the bone is not in that side so that's going to kind of determine what i can do if i wanted to do the voodoo doll action i can cross off two of the circles there actually not cross off i can fill in two of the circles there and what that's gonna allow me to do on a later turn is to mitigate the numbers on one of the dice a plus one or minus one and then once you do that this comes pre-filled with the first one you would just mark off that you used one of those if the coin happened to be on the side with the bone i can mark off two of those move one uh circles too that if i wanted to do that later on i could move one of the runes keeping its sides and numbers the same from one side of the dish to the other the other thing i could do is if i have the wanted to use the coin or excuse me the d4 there with that i can mark off an x either in the faction area or in this horoscopes area which i'll talk about in just a moment all right so this is really an area that you can go to kind of mitigate the dice in some way or the runes in some way all right so that is twisting fates the other thing that you can do is star charting all right and that's up here that's gonna cost you two time to do it what you're gonna do there is you're gonna look at the you have to have the bone and at least one of the dice in the same side like we have here what you'll do is you will take the number that is on the die and if there were both dice on that side you would choose and you are going to draw that many lines in this star charting area so in this case i have four lines to play with that gives me a couple of options because what you're trying to do is you are trying to enclose boxes of the different colors so here you can see red blue yellow and green all right that represent the different goods so i've got four lines to play with if you enclose a a one by one square you get a small good of the corresponding color if you enclose a two by one square you get a large good so i have a couple options let's say i wanted to do this one and you have to go from one a one uh dot adjacent orthogonally to another so one two three four that would get me a filled in two by one i could go ahead and fill that in i would take a large red good and place it on my sales table however since some of the lines i used to complete that are connected to this corruption cross i would have to take a corruption card another option i could have would be like maybe i wanted a small green good instead i can go one two three four i would get a small green good and since i'm not connected to that uh corruption cross at all i would go ahead and take that without a corruption card all right so this is one of the ways that you can get these goods that you are trying to sell to the customers in uh the next phase of the game alright so that is star charting all right another thing you can do is divination all right actually that's down here sorry divination takes one hour as you can see right there and with divination what you're trying to do is you are trying to kind of make a guess you're trying to predict which customers are going to come out of the adventurer bag and so to do the divination you have to have the voodoo doll meeple and a die on one side and we do here we've got it the d4 with the voodoo meeple and that's also showing a four and so what you're going to do there is you are going to count that many of these adventurer meeples and so this is the first turn i would start from the left side and i'd go one two three four and i would go ahead and draw a vertical line there all right and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to choose one of the colors all right and so let's say that i'm predicting that the the next adventure that comes out of the bag is going to be a yellow customer and you can kind of see which customers have come out so it's not just a blind guess you can get you know a little bit of an idea and you'll cross out all of the colors that do not match that one so if i'm doing yellow i'd cross out the green red or and the blue in each of these all right and hope that the next customer that comes out would be a yellow you can have multiple divinations at one time so maybe i thought the next one would be a red i'm hoping for red too go ahead and mark those out all right and so what you're trying to do is guess correctly so let's say that at first the first customer that came out was not a yellow so i'd have to say shoot i messed up i marked that off and it's also not a red so maybe a blue or green so i would do that but if on a future turn let's say that yellow comes out next i've got three yellows that are open there that's correct and so this is going to lead to the bonuses so if you have three or more correct on a divination you get a large good of the associated color if you get two or more then uh oh it's actually not the associate color it's of any color i'm sorry two or more you can get a small of any color or one or more you can cross off an x in the area here which is the horoscopes area or you can mark off a market icon in this faction area which will give you bonuses later on alright the last thing to talk about here as far as actions is right here and that is the horoscopes area that takes two hours i've talked about that a little bit uh in other places because there are other things that will allow you to put x's here and i'll explain why in a moment all right in this area you've got two separate tracks you've got tracks that are trying to go in ascending order from small to larger and descending order on that bottom track and so what you're going to do for that uh horoscope area is you are going to choose one side of the divining dish and for each die write that number into the leftmost empty box so it would be most efficient if you had both dice on one side especially if you had some that fit both of your lines but in this case i'd have to choose one of these dice both of which are a four so in that case what i would do is i would likely put that in this leftmost bottom because that would work perfectly there because you want the larger numbers at the at the beginning so they can go down all right what the x's do and i've said in other places you can put an x in the horoscope area is an x is basically a wild it allows you to kind of start over again so if i had a 3 here that's not great because then the next one would have to be a 4. but if i put an x there you can start again from the beginning and even put a one there all right so x's give you some flexibility here the other thing that this area is going to do is it's going to give you some bonuses either above or below depending on where uh which track you're talking about so you might get a small either red or blue good there you might get a market icon here which again will give you bonuses later you might be able to remove a corruption card that you have taken up all right so that is the horoscope area which will allow you to gain bonuses uh throughout the game all right the last thing i did want to talk about briefly before i talk about how i feel about the oracle character are your bonuses that you can get here all right and so this is for activating your staff basically these two icons are on all of the boards this is gaining new uh gaining new townsfolk recruiting or replacing townsfolk and this is activating your staff ability and this is this happens when you've got cards slotted above them you can activate these abilities so this allows you to draw an x in the horoscope or faction area this allows you to draw two lines on your star chart there all right this make sure that's in focus here this allows you to fill in two of the twisting fate bubbles either one the moved the move uh or plus one minus one and this is the same on every character the last one is to remove a corruption all right well that is the basics for the oracle character let me tell you my thoughts on [Music] it okay there you have the oracle the oracle is the character that i'm gonna be actually rating a five on the complexity scale and just as a reminder if you haven't watched any of the other videos in this series i'm ranking all of these characters on a a scale of one to five with one being least complex and five being most complex but i want to make sure that it's understood that that's only within the realm of merchant's cove characters so it's not a terrifically heavy game to begin with any of the characters are probably manageable for what i would call seasoned gamers but within the scope of these characters i feel like the oracle is the most complex it use it uses primarily a role and right now you're not necessarily rolling dice in a standard way you're kind of tossing runes two of those runes actually are dice d4 dice but you're putting them into that kind of divination bowl that's not exactly the right terminology the reason why i have this higher on the complexity scale is just that there's a little bit more of interaction between the actions on the board it's not quite as straightforward as the other characters in the game are there's more triggering of bonuses and so it's just there's more to track more to keep track of and and the way that the runes work where you essentially each of the actions are going to determine are going to depend upon a combination of rooms and runes and the side of the dish that they are on and the different ways that you can mitigate those runes by either moving them from one side of the dish to the other or changing the value of the dice all of those things lead to a slightly more complex character than the other ones in the game certainly more complex than something like the blacksmith which i rated a level of one on the complexity scale so again it's not something that i think you have to necessarily be concerned about for somebody who is a regular hobby board gamer but it might not be the best choice as a first character uh for somebody if they've played the game before and they feel comfortable with how things work with you know the market uh phase and how the docs work and how to kind of manipulate the customers there then they they you know might want to go to the oracle because this is definitely a bit of a step up but it might be a little bit too much for somebody the first time again unless they are a well-seasoned gamer they're used to playing heavier games this is not going to trip them up at all but within the scope of these characters this is the one i would feel is the most complex alright well keep watching if you want to see what i feel about all the different characters within merchants cove this is going to be culminating in a video where i give you my ranking of preference of the merchant's cove characters and that's it for me this is mike delecio signing off from dice tower headquarters [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 1,757

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, juegosdemesa, Brettspiele, ボードゲーム, brädspel, jeuxdesociété, משחקילוח, 보드게임, deskováhra, graplanszowa, bordspel, 棋盘游戏, gioco da tavolo, desková hra, gra planszowa, настольная игра, trò chơi trên bàn cờ, jogo de tabuleiro, لعبة اللوحة

Id: HnLcZAF6p9E

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021