Ancient Trader

Ancient Trader is a turn-based strategy video game played from a two-dimensional perspective. The player controls a ship and seeks out three artifacts to defeat the game's final boss, a sea creature called the Ancient Guardian. The player explores the map to gather items, including tea, spices, and fruit, all of which can be found in wrecks. These can be exchanged for gold, which can be used to buy upgrades for the ship. The commodities are stored in the cargo hold, the capacity of which can be upgraded with gold.

At the beginning of the game, the entire map is obscured until explored by the player. The map consists of a landlocked sea with several islands, wreckage, sea creatures, enemy ships, ports, and whirlpools. The player can sometimes encounter message bottles that clear away fog of war on the map to reveal hidden ports. Sea creatures and enemy ships appear randomly and challenge the player for gold or commodities in a card minigame.

Ancient Trader is the first video game developed by the Slovakian studio 4Kids Games. The development team consisted of the lead designer Peter Levius, the artist Petr Vcelka, the game designer Miroslav Petrasko, and the programmer Andrej Vakrcka. The score was composed by Milan Malik, while Jan Ohajsky designed and animated the graphics. The game was developed using Microsoft XNA, a set of game development tools.

According to Levius, Ancient Trader took around one year to finish; "most of our team members [...] were working hard on other higher priority projects at the same time". The game was submitted for XNA approval on 2 June 2010.

Ancient Trader received positive responses from several video game journalists upon its release. Most critics praised the game's art design and gameplay, but criticized the lack of key elements such as a saving feature and scoreboards. The British magazine Edge included Ancient Trader in its 2010 list of the Best 20 Indie Games available in the Xbox Live Marketplace. They acknowledged that the game was "ambitious, devious and surprisingly hard to fault". IGN staff called it "a simple, easy entry strategy game suitable for all ages".

Tom Chick from FidGit compared Ancient Trader to video games such as The Seven Cities of Gold and Sid Meier's Pirates!, as well as to other indie games such as "the sci-fi space operettas Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Flotilla, but wind-powered and sepia-toned". Like most reviewers, Chick highly praised the artistic design, as well as the game's atmospheric music and vividness of the environment: "It's all ink and vellum and cursive script and layers of lovingly drawn facades drawn on plywood and stacked up for a 19th Century stage production."