Maracaibo Review - Follow-up to Great Western Trail

generally starting a boardgame video is easy games have themes and those themes have a hook hey do you want to play a board game where the moon crashed onto earth and now this giant samurais with swords fighting dragons will do you with yer games however things are a little bit more complicated for example today's game Maracaibo is all about sailing a boat in the 17th century in the Caribbean delivering goods engaging in military skirmishes exploring uncharted territories and sir how dare you call me a pirate if you're not familiar with euro games they're essentially solitaire puzzles where the best hope of interaction you have with your friends is maybe a passive aggressive knock-on effect because someone took a resource that you wanted or maybe landed on a spot where you wanted to go you're not so much fighting against them you're just fighting to be better as games they are frequently intricate with many interlocking mechanisms and sometimes requiring quite a bit of rules overhead I love euro games but they can be a little bit of a hard sell because theme is at best a tertiary concern don't get me wrong it can do theme but it's a bit like asking a chimp to wield a lightsaber it has the ability to do it because your opposable thumbs but only the most ardent of chimp who's iasts will be delighted with the result a much better hook for cardboard aficionados is mentioning the designers name for example if we said that Maracaibo is the new heavy euro game from alexander Pfister I said Maracaibo is the new heavy euro game from Alexander Pfister and now you know that we mean business get ready for some chunky rules talk the central conundrum of Maracaibo revolves around sailing through the Caribbean each time your turn comes along you get to take to the seas around this one-way circle of various villages or cities in the archipelago you can sell anywhere between one or seven spaces but any space you skip you can never come back to this round what space you land on determines what you can do and the rules are different based on whether you land in a city or a village generally in cities you will be able to find a yo sushi and in villages not so much wait a minute now that's right each city has a unique action that will let you engage with one of the games scoring tracks all provide you with resources they can even be different between each game or fall into a different distribution additionally each city rewards you for reaching it earlier than any of the other players if you have a card in your hand and a lot more on these a little bit later with a matching good you can spend that good and take a disk from your player board and plunk it down proudly like a flat wooden brown rosette of achievement the disk itself does nothing for you it blocks that space for others to make a delivery since the city no longer needs that crappy corn you've got steering in your salty barrels the action of taking the disk off is another story your personal player board is a ship although I won't blame you if you mistake it for student accommodation because it features an absolute mess of abilities and bonuses a part of fun of Maracaibo is untangling this mess and even though through the course of the game you will be able to unlock about three-quarters of all of these abilities it's choosing the order in which you do it that really rounds out your booty Elaine made me have all these pirate puns each turn you'll begin with your hand loaded with four cards these itself have a various set of features and choosing what you spend them on is another puzzle altogether would you like a wider selection of cards that's not a problem just unlock the six card hand limit bonus and one-eyed Bob's your uncle refilling your hand at the end of your tan is a simple method of drawing cards from the top of the deck or you could alternatively pay one coin per card to select them from the display this way you can ensure that you have for example the right good to deliver to the next destination yes the goods remember those they are still the root of this entire conversation and can't have other features such as permanent abilities or occupations that you can later turn in for quests but what if you didn't want to pay any money for having the right to choose which card you want that ability is also available talking of abilities these cards have various powers or effects that you can build which is a weird term for playing a card especially considering that most of these cards are people as if you're literally building humans not to mention that one of the cards is called a master builder and to get him to master build you first have to build him when you build cards they'll become permanent changes to rules or they'll increase your income or grant you a new village action or become a new location on the main board where you can stop and do something that's not available for anyone else like a naughty little secret just between you the trouble is building these cards cost dollars dosh doubloons and it's a resource that disappears quickly especially at the start of the game when your enterprise isn't quite established yet would you like a little bit more money maybe that's okay you can have it if you guessed it take disks off your player board and that's half of what happens when you go to a city because the other half is taking the action itself and there's a whole host of those but we'll talk about some of them later and if you're saying to me right now Africa did all of those rules explanations print from a tiny buy roll over roll which dimensionally represents only one squared centimeter of the board that's 56 squared centimeters itself which makes up exactly 3136 of it then my answer is yes yes it did but that's just how this game rolls mechanisms cascade into mechanisms cascade into mechanisms which were the original mechanisms cascading into mechanisms and from a physics perspective it makes about as much sense as the Penrose stairs or in fact building the master builder but let's talk about village actions villages are any spaces that aren't cities and stopping on any one of them will offer you an identical suite of actions except of course that suite increases if you take discs off your player board or build other cards you can either take a coin discard your hand of cards to get to coins or build a card unlike games with similar mechanisms these ancillary village actions are not necessarily worse they're just different the further you move the more village actions you'll get when you stop and timing when to land on a village is a fine trick because these villages are broken up by cities frequently you'll have to move enough spaces and skip a city asking you to forego perhaps an instrumental action but then maybe you get to have a village action that lets you build the exact right card that powers up a different City action did I mention that there's an ability that makes it all better if you take a disk off finding the exact right village to land on is like firing that proton torpedo that takes out the Death Star it's like finding the exact right spot to Huggy grizzly bear a spot that simultaneously tames it and doesn't outright moreyou with its overbearing presence and also lets you ride that bear into victory that's an overall analogy you might say Africa but do you know what welcome to Maracaibo but all of that is rendered meaningless if you haven't got the right cards as we mentioned before each card has three functions you can spend it as a good when arriving at cities you can spend it as an object when arriving at special locations which have been designated as quests which lets you forego a city or village action to instead claim the quest and its rewards or you can build the card and unlock whatever ability it provides here's the thing through a fairly tedious set up process you will end up with a deck of about 80 cards those cards might or might not be the same in subsequent games each of them opens up potential new avenues and strategies to explore maybe one game you'll lean into privateering another into exploring or maybe you'll just rely on a cookie combination you've dreamt up like building continuous copies of the master builder which makes all future cards you build Cheaper by one so then each next one you build increases that discount further making cards perpetually cheaper and also the master builder just happens to have a strong resemblance to annoying British comedian Jimmy Carr who went to Elaine's school by the way and you think to yourself do you know what I'll call it the Jimmy Carr strategy without realizing that for the rest of that playthrough all you can hear in your head is that grating laughter and you think to yourself no Africa focus strategize but instead know that that's ever happened to me I'm just saying the possibilities are endless okay you've just settled on which cards you wanted to build and oops you've just spent the card that you reserved for delivering a good The Audacity of triple function cards is that your hand is in a constant battle with itself let's say that I really wanted the harbour for its ability but I also need the sugar that it has to deliver a good that's fine I have another sugar card the inkeeper but the innkeeper also has the object that I wanted to fulfill a quest that's fine I have another of the same object but of course I also wanted the ability on that card and that's when I realized that Mahara Kaiba is amazing because in spite of its Byzantine intricate web of interlocking mechanisms and interactions and endless traps of indecision they'll make the best of us look like a caricature of Jeannie Anna Gonia Maracaibo somehow remains not annoying considered the games two main scoring mechanisms each game will straddle the trapeze of exploration and fighting if you lean into exploring you'll set off on a track of copious rewards whenever you explore you'll travel a number of spaces on this track let's say that in this example we've been allotted free movement which means I could learn here and get myself free coins all right here and get myself two points or here and just get a measly coin which is obviously worse than free coins but if I do decide to land here then I'm moving further along the exploration track and the further I reach the better the bonuses are not to mention that if I somehow managed to explore again I be able to hopscotch over all of these opponents for free and land on a space that gives me three points and free coins later in the track not only can I reach spaces that will make the free coins look like an underdone crumpet that means just a little bit disappointing for all you non British viewers but if I'm efficient he'll reach spaces that are better versions of the actions available on the board and if I reach the end I can straddle myself onto what is essentially a virtual catapult of victory points there are also cars that will let you place an assistant on the map permanently changing that location but only for you now you have an operator working in the shadows maybe an innkeeper that's been gathering rumours and keeping a business running whenever you stop by they'll provide you with a special action only available to you when you start the game this is scarcely an opportunity to explore on this board and even then not very efficiently but of course there's a card if you build it allow you to place an assistant and that assistant will allow you to perform an extra exploration every single round suddenly this crumpet starts looking very hard I realize I just sexualized the crumpet which really wasn't my intention fighting is slightly harder to explain because much like the rest of this game it leans slightly on the convoluted site but here's the gist each time you fight you flip a token that token tells you how much combat value you'll get depending on which nation you choose to fight for sometimes France will be strong and sometimes England will be strong and sometimes Spain will be strong which is of course funny because much like a real-life normal pirate they would evaluate first which side is doing best before taking on the job that seems like a non-decision because the combat value tells you how much fighting you can do you can spend your combat value to either increase your influence or plug that country's Cube onto one of the cities to get a reward or if you have enough combat value both and there's also other combat abilities if you take a disk of all song cards and just like that the non-decision becomes the non non decision choosing which country to fight for is an investment your influence is multiplied by how many cubes have been flunked onto the map and that's how many points you'll score extra at the end of the game you're a happy-go-lucky mercenary demeanour can go pack it in now because now that you've made your bed with England you'll keep wanting to fight for England and you'll draw a combo token and suddenly Spain gets all the combat value and you'll say mum mum I want to fight for England and mum represented by the chaotically overbearing nature of this game will reply shut up and pick up a sword Maracaibo sets up a special feeling of ownership each round you're straddled on a whirlwind that'll rip you through the Caribbean or maybe just toss you a sign turns out that being not at all a pirate isn't as freeing as you'd want it to be the waves will sweep you aside on to expensive side tracks or batting you into a pile of bad decisions just before you reach the finish line folks who have had the chance to try out fists as previous cow Jim Great Western trail will recognize the circular nature of travel although it has its own signature spin each game consists of exactly four rounds and a round is finished when one person reaches the finish line putting it in stark contrast to the Carroll delivery simulator Great Western trail asked you to weigh up how many rotations you could complete before the game's workers whittled themselves into an end state Maracaibo I'll see how long do you want to dawdle travelling to various files hunting for opportunities maybe increasing your victory point income imagine there's a victory point income track meaning that at the end of each round you will get a set number of victory points and you can increase that value and then you look at yours and yours is like six and your opponent is like that you're like ah I want to dawdle some more because there's opportunities for me to stop and increase that income victory point track and thus someone eventually reaches the ending and you're like boy I wanted to do some more fighting and exploring for one last time maybe just another time before that one last time and then maybe five more times before that other last one and then the cycle repeats for another three rounds generally you don't want to after all the more places you visit the more you can exploit I mean the more you can make business whilst I spent quite a bit of time comparing Maracaibo to Great Western trail this game is still very much its own thing even though they have a lot of the same juices coursing through their veins both games feature a dynamic map that evolves based on decisions you make for better or worse you get to build your own Caribbean and shape the path you'll trudge on maybe you'll establish a tavern and now that's a business that will bring you money and gossip and maybe that's exactly what you needed when you were young and inexperienced sailor with hopes and dreams and not a cent in your pocket yet still somehow you managed to build a tavern because rich parents I don't know but now that you've seen the riches the archipelago has to offer the older you is cursing your younger self what were you thinking you did only have to evaluate about 17 billion different cards with free modes on each of them other juices are also available Maracaibo doesn't just riff on Great Western trail but also vistas other games the fighting mechanism borrows heavily from Mombasa and its share system the multi functionality of card season influence from both all my goods and blackout hongkong retaining heck not even just retaining but molding your own sense of identity with so much graft and splice is a miracle as wondrous as Pinocchio this isn't just a real boy this is a well-worn ship battered by the waves full of character and charm and graphical design that makes it look like someone drew a bunch of lightsabers onto the board but now that we mentioned our it's time to have the talk Maracaibo is set in the Caribbean at the whooping heights of colonialism and there's absolutely nothing wrong with a historical setting but unlike something like our earlier reviewed packs premiere second edition this doesn't feel very well-researched aside from getting all the capital letter nouns right nor does it feel like it has anything to say there's hundreds and hundreds of cards with multitudes of different characters and all of them you guessed it are indeed very white in fact scouring through the decks I've only found two non-white characters and one of them is called a native witch for a game set in the Caribbean feels just a smidge tone-deaf there's a reason I started this video with I love euro games because I do or mechanical merits Maracaibo is a star but with each passing year the traditional German method of telling stories through games feels more and more out of touch and by now it's reached a point where one of two things has happened either everyone involved in the development of Maracaibo was blithely oblivious which needs to change or this is willful diminishing of the subject which also needs to change and honestly I can't believe I'm saying this but I won't blame you if you ignore that because euro games have a long-standing tradition or theme just serving a set dressing for mechanisms it's not trying to tell a story it's just imitating tropes for the sake of cohesion no one buys these for rip-roaring adventure we just want to dabble with the next take on deck building or rondelle's or whatever but here's where things get a little tricky because Maracaibo unlike euro games does tell a story or at least tries to it's a campaign game which takes you through 11 chapters of a narrative and does some very innovative things when it comes to mechanical structure of campaign games in fact just the term campaign game alone is enough to drive copious amounts of fear into any board game as hard because here's yet another box that you'll start with your friends and never finish but wait not only is there a fully functioning and great non campaign version in the box but also the open nature of the campaign mode makes it irrelevant whether you played from the star or the finish or you played with the same people or constantly revolving cast of friends each chapter will introduce new locations evolving the carribean into a more and more complex and intricate puzzle and that gradual growth offers something no Euro game has done before a slightly different gauntlet each time you sit down with new variables to consider and mechanical questions to crack but the narrative itself the text on these cards I won't mince words it's rubbish basic predictable toss that you'll find better versions of on a Tesco value box of conflicts a burrito with no bird to eat Oh which is a double dip into disappointment considering that this could have been a chance to say something meaning about this historical period and I know I know I'm expecting too much because finding a designer that can craft something that's simultaneously an engrossing and mind-bending gauntlet of decisions but also tells a fantastic story I'm not even sure that person is out there and that's fine don't do everything yourself delegate find someone or get your publishers to find someone or get a publisher who will find someone who'll do the narrative and do the story and do it justice and whilst you're at it maybe you could find a publisher with a good rule book editor because this was an actual pain to read or if you're not willing to do the work then find a setting with no real-world impact mr. Pfister we love your work but this is a call to action you need to step up your game and if it doesn't bother you you heard everything you need to know whether you should get yourself a copy of Maracaibo an otherwise triumphant epitome of Alexander Pfister's designs complete dramatic misfires aside I would be lying if I didn't admit that I loved carving out my path and watching that path grow based on the decisions I made every step had its own quirks complications and character not because of the tired trope of privateering but because trying to unwrap this rhizomatic explosion of causality was a story unto itself and that's Alexander Festus great power and its own best show here even if ultimately Maracaibo doesn't introduce anything groundbreaking into the genre if you enjoyed this video think that makes me very happy because I'm hanging these big heavy euro games is a lot of work and if you appreciated that work and give us a subscribe thing believe it or not in this strange YouTube well the SUBSCRIBE things make our life a lot easier thank you very much

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 53,106

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2019, maracaibo, alexander pfister

Id: flS0zGlE6xY

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/maracaibo98]

I'm from Maracaibo! I will be getting this game!

[u/soullessgingerfck]

good balanced approach in my opinion

"this is a problem, but it might not be a problem for you"

personally i tend to be fine with a weakly attached theme to great mechanics, but I am struggling for a mechanical reason to get this over GWT - maybe the country influence system?

[u/NTG_Boardgamer]

I really like NPI and their reviews. Tend to be a good mix of being critical of a games and remembering they are still fans of board games, so their excitement of a game or designer is enough to get them to buy a game sometimes. They still love board games and the hobby and don’t see it as just a career.

[u/gamer123098]

I'm interested in hearing Elaine's thoughts but haven't seen her in the past couple of videos. It was a good review. I was already sold on this game ages ago but this reinforces my decision to order this.

[u/Danwarr]

So I was very excited about Maracaibo for most of the year. I love Capstone Games as a publisher and I really enjoy most of Pfister's catalog.

However, this review definitely put me off the "gotta have it" train and has made me extremely cautious about even wanting to learn it.

I'm not afraid of heavy games in the slightest, I'm a big Splotter and 18xx fan, but something about Efka's explanation of actions and seeing how busy the cards look just make me think maybe Pfister went a little too overboard on this title. Multi-use cards are great, but they still need to convey information in an effective way and make parsing a strategy possible and I just don't get a good sense of that from the video and look at pics of the cards in various places. The "Legacy" elements also just seem like way too much, but I can understand it being added to give the game a little extra longevity. Overall, the game just seems too "busy" for not a lot of "oomph" especially when compared to GWT or my personal Pfister favorite Broom Service. \

Hopefully I'm wrong and the game is great, I still really want to try it, but I'm definitely less excited to do so now than I was 30 minutes ago.

[u/DarCam7]

Thanks for the review. This game is way out of my depth. No way am I gonna get all the rules and intricate tidbits to play it correctly.

I dunno if you ever thought of doing a video helping those novice players entering into modern gaming get over the hump of heavy games. Maybe describing five games that go from light to super duper heavy and each game increases the difficulty and adds mechanics that would be alien for someone just getting into gaming.

From Catan to Twilight Imperium. That sort of thing.

[u/pharmacon]

What are those holders that can be seen at 0:20?

[u/[deleted]]

I can't decide if I should take a punt on this or not. I love GWT, but the step up in complexity might be a barrier.

Can you actually battle/pirate other players? It wasn't really clear from the review, but that would be a selling point!

[u/linkandluke]

I love NPI. Thanks for posting this.