Sometimes, your log may say things like “Feast in Town X! Price of olive oil is high!” but by the time your lowly horse-drawn cart finds its way there (after you spend what seems like a century trying to locate the city on your map… would a “search” function have killed the developers?), the deal’s over and you’re left with an excess of expensive cargo. Yeah, there’re some seasonal changes, and a couple of goods follow the rule-of-thumb of “buy in villages, sell in cities”, but even those weren’t guaranteed, and price fluctuations felt essentially arbitrary. To make good strategic choices, you have to be able to discern patterns and trends, and Kaidani makes that pretty difficult. Like I said, the core mechanic is about buying goods for low prices, and selling them for higher ones. Unfortunately, it’s “strategy” where Kaidan is found lacking.

variation in games, check out this great blog post). Yes, all these events add flavor, and randomness keeps things from getting stale, but for a strategy game, it seemed a little over-salted with random events that threw off the player (for an excellent discussion on randomness vs. Especially in the early parts of the game, I was incredibly frustrated by micro-catastrophes Kaidan kept throwing at me: cart breakdowns (really, do they make ‘em out of eggshells?), thieving highwaymen, over-zealous tax-collectors, and bizarrely, gnomes trapped in treasure chests. Most of them tend to rob your hard-earned money or goods. Oh random events: drunken crew-members, weird old women, snakes… You have a “luck” score (which for me, tended to hover around the negative 0.5 mark, as much as I tried making offering to the “Blind God.”), which presumably determines how bad your random events are going to be. You can finish quests to boost your income (all of which are the basically just different variations of “Pick me up in this city and take me to another!”), explore ruins and abandoned buildings, make investments by founding massage parlors, monasteries and other establishments, and hire different crew-members for your caravan of trade-wagons. Kaidan tries, and only sometimes succeeds, in spicing up the genre by adding a couple of different elements to the game.

Kaidan is a trading simulation game (which you may be familiar with if you’ve played Sid Meier’s Pirates, or the Patrician series), where the fundamental game mechanic is buy low and sell high. And unless you’re willing to put in hours of grinding, swearing, and frustrating map-cross-referencing, his family’s enemies are almost certainly going to have the last laugh. Unlucky for him, his wheeling and dealing is controlled by you, the average hardcore gamer, in Forever Entertainment’s Merchants of Kaidan. That could very well sum up the life of Ollivean, the sole surviving heir to a once powerful noble dynasty, who sells his family ring and decides to endure the life of a travelling merchant, aiming to climb back to the top of the social (read: financial) ladder, and avenge his kinsmen’s death. “Revenge is profitable,” Edward Gibbon famously wrote book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Merchants of kaidan s team