Sky Traders - Tips & Strategies

While it’s rich in there, Sky Traders hasn’t exactly won the hearts of the critics. It’s market manipulation mechanism is novel in itself, but unfortunately serves to stagnate the game, with all players having too much control over commodity prices, meaning the values of goods never really swings to the extremes needed to promote active market trade. This in turn leads to the game frequently stretching on far past three hours for a play.

To help address these issues, FFG have released an official FAQ and Errata (Link) with variants to help sleed up play. But why stop there? Over on BGG, the game’s designer Gioacchino Prestigiacomo (Presti70) has released his own play variant, The Director’s Cut 2.0. Not that this rules set incorporates Errata v1.0.

1. Black market Set-Up
During step 3 of “Setup,” place the black market good slider on the far right space (“50”) of the black market row on the Commodities Exchange.

2.Optional Shortage and Surplus Rolls
Ignore Step 3 of the Guild Council. This lessens randomization in the market, and gives players more control.

3.Investment Limits
The small printed dice icons in the investment boxes of each class of legal goods no longer limit the number of dice that can be assigned to the box. Instead, up to four dice can be assigned to each of the positive and negative boxes. However, when calculating the price adjustments, players only count the dice in each box up to the number of printed dice icons. For example, if four dice are assigned to the positive die box for class 6, only two of those dice are counted towards the class 6 price adjustment. When adjusting the market prices for the Sludge Exchange and the Black Market, count all of the dice in the positive and negative boxes, regardless of the dice icons.

4.Fast Game Variant
Blue Influence costs 3 GP; Yellow costs 5 GP; Orange costs 10 GP.

5.Volcano Variant
When a player dumps his sludge into the Volcano, he will receive a reward equal to 1GP for each discarded Sludge.

6.Battle Rules Variant
During the battle, a player adds the combat value of ALL the Crew Cards hired in his ship.
– Treat the hold number of the Gunner as 6 instead of 4-5-6
– The reward of the pirate king (+5) is 50GP instead of 100GP

7.Wanted Trader Variant
A destroyed player that owns one or more wanted tokens doesn’t receive Insurance and Charity payments.