In Lots of ways this game is very similar to Avalon Hills Merchant of Venus yet is a very different game in play.
Duck Dealer to play well will require a lot of forward planning to set up those lucrative trade routes and so win the game.

Splotter Spellen is well known for big games like Roads & Boats and Antiquity which came in big boxes, whereas this game comes in a box the size of Indonesia and apart from a few wooden cubes and discs the rest of the components are cardboard counters to represent the various goods.

Players start off on one of the home worlds. On a players turn they have two choices initially. either collect energy or take actions. To collect energy you choose either a move, build or trade marker plus extra energy markers depending on what you have onboard your ship. So you will spend several turns at the beginning just collecting energy so that you can then take actions.

The Take Action phase is the heart of the game in which you can:
Place a cube on the turn track - there are 24 turns shared between all the players, so in a 4 player game you will likely only do 5 or 6 action turns, so you have to make the best use of them that you can!
Place up to 3 cubes on routes - doing this will reduce the energy cost to travel these routes.
Use from zero to all your energy markers collected previously to move, build and/or trade. You can do these steps in any order as often as you like, so long as you the energy to do so.

Lets look at these three areas:
Move - this costs red energy markers and for one energy marker you can move 2, 5 or 8 steps depending on how full your spaceship is. Any steps where you have placed cubes can be ignored, so placing cubes on the highways is all part of your forward planning
Build - Building a factory, spaceyard or consumer costs you a build energy marker and placing these lets you then buy and sell to these places. For 3 build energy, you can make a mine priviledged, which reduces your cost to trade there.
Trade - Trade costs 1 trade energy marker, plus the goods needed for the trade. Using these trade markers lets you buy goods to use at factories to make better goods to take to consumers to sell them for VPs.

Whoever has the most VPs after turn 24 wins.

I really enjoyed this game. Setting up your trade routes and making best use of your Action Turns when you take them makes for a very interesting game with lots of decisions to make, even though the game play itself is quite straightforward. This is quite a deep game and rewards good play. There can be some downtime while players decide what to do on their action turns, but this time can be well spent by planning what your actions are going to be when it is your turn to do an Action turn.

Review by Brian