The Guild of Merchant Explorers Board Game Review - Pretty unique flip and write

Description provided by Real Jon on YouTube:

The Guild of Merchant Explorers is a flip and write without the usual flip/roll and write components. The game is surprisingly quite unique (despite the sea of roll/flip and write games nowadays) and I loved the clever twists this game offers. I quite enjoy the harshness of the reset mechanic, and I don't see that in a lot of board games. It's not perfect by any means though, for one, I think the treasure chest needs a revamp. It's just so underwhelming and random, making it not worth it at all. It should never be anyone's priority because getting two coins from the chest is like a middle finger given by the game. I think they should: 1. Make the quest rewards a lot better, like double the potential coins you can get. 2. Make it a shared resource like I discussed in the video 3. Put a selection out so it's not random. 4. Get rid of the end game village goals (I really dont understand this, no one will ever go for those end game coins because of how hard the game resets every round. Getting villages on its own is already not that easy, let alone getting a village IN A SPECIFIC LAND TYPE) A few more things I wasn't sure about that I didnt discuss in the video: 1. The randomness of the era cards bugs me a bit. There is that one card (the one that lets you travel 3 spaces from 2 of your villages) that is completely useless if you get it on the first round. So if you get that as a choice, you're at the mercy of whatever the other card is. Im sure there are a lot more situations in which people choose the least useless out of the two because they got a bad draw. I feel like an easy fix to this is to just deal more instead of just two. 2. 4 players max despite the multiplayer solitaire. They probably are saving money for the components I assume, because this game can go up to how many ever players like your usual flip/roll and writes if they want it to be (and with very minimum changes to the gameplay). It's a shame that they dont at least make it so that it goes up to 5 or 6, because now it has to compete with other 4 player games during game nights. Despite all the complains, the game is still surprisingly good and I enjoyed the 6 games I played so far. Definitely need more maps though.