Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road

Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road is a tight euro in the proper sense: twelve moves in which to push every dial in a fairly elaborate puzzle. My first game, at four, made it feel more demanding than it needed to be, with a few uncomfortable questions about balance.

Each move feeds a chain of tracks. You climb one to unlock something elsewhere, which opens the next useful thing; the familiar euro pleasure of doing one job so that three others become possible. Here, of course, you have to fit that ambition into twelve rounds. The camel mechanism is one of the better parts of the design, giving all that linked machinery some welcome movement.

Then the other players get involved. At four, the Mongol attacks lost their teeth and the Mosque track looked like it was serving victory ready-made. At three, tending your own neat little engine is not enough: you watch where the player beside you is going, close off one or two crucial routes, and accept that they will do precisely that to you. That is where the game starts.

It is not perfect, and it still asks for more work than its first glance suggests. But Merv is very good at three: a game that initially looks broken, then reveals a much sounder balance once the table learns to bite.

Updated session

Repeated games at three changed my view plainly. The apparently unbalanced routes did not vanish by magic; they simply met players who watched for them and cut them off in time. At three, though, Merv is not broken; it wants players to read each other’s plans and cut them at the right moment.