Maracaibo

 21st March 2020

Saturday is here and normal Saturday gaming has not resumed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

On the last meeting of the Woking Gaming Club, Simon & Colin invited us to play a final game, provided that an opportunity would present itself. And that opportunity did present itself - on Saturday 21st March.

So we're at Simon's for a Saturday as his wife and children are away.

The game of the night was 'Maracaibo'.

​If you've ever favoured yourself as an adventurer, explorer or trader jobbing your way round and round in circles for years in the Caribbean. Then maybe, just maybe. This is a game for you.

What's in a game?
Maracaibo is a big game with a lot of components, cards and tiles:

• Game board: It depicts a big and colourful map of the Caribbean, that shows 22 different ports, islands and locations within the Caribbean. It also depicts a victory track, 2 'economy' tracks for income and victory points, an influence track aaaand finally a exploration track. That's right, lots of tracks.
• Personal boards: These represent each player's individual board, the board is full of abilities that can be unlocked through upgrades
• Meeples: Each player gets 8 meeples, an explorer meeple, a ship meeple and some discs and cubes in their colour.
• More discs: Used to track ship upgrades.
• More cubes: In 3 colours (Red, blue & white.), used to track the influence of the 3 competing nations (Spain, France & England.) in the game.
• Player cards: These are given to players and gives them individual objectives in the game. Each objective card has 3 meeples placed on it, when an objective is met, it's meeple is moved to the player's board and becomes usable by that player.
• Project cards: These are tasks that players can complete for bonuses and victory points. Project cards also count as a type of good and can be spent to supply that type of good.
• Prestige buildings: These objective cards are harder to complete and are 'communal' and can be completed by multiple players.
• Quest tiles: These are quests that appear in the game that can be completed by players.
• City tiles: City tiles give player 2 extra actions to perform when they reach those city tiles. One of these actions is always supplying a good for a reward.
• Combat tokens: When combat occurs, these tokens act as randomisers.
• Synergy tokens: Some project cards give the player a synergy token when completed. Then there are other project cards that grant bonuses if the player has certain synergy tokens. Thus there is synergy between cards!
• Automata cards: Used for the solo mode.
• Story card: Mostly used in campaign.
• Story tiles: Used in the campaign mode.
• Legacy tiles: Used in the campaign mode.
• Bag: Used in the campaign mode.

As you can see, there are a lot of components. The component quality and artwork are all good.

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Main board at game start.

Player board at game start.

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How's it play?
There's quite a lot of setup to this game.
Since we're not playing the campaign, some of the components will be left out.

• Place all the influence cubes on to their relevant tracks for each of the countries.
• Shuffle the project cards and place them into a face-down stack, deal 4 of them face-up in a line next to the stack.
• Shuffle the quest tiles and place 3 face-up in the relevant spots on the exploration track.
• Place more quest tiles in the relevant spots along the main track.
• Place the city tiles on to their relevant spaces along the main track.
• Shuffle the prestige buildings and deal 1 face-up and 3 face-down in the playing area.

OK, that's it for board setup, now on to player setup.

• Each player places their ship meeple on to the starting spot (In Havana.) on the main track.
• Each player puts their explorer at the start of the exploration track.
• Next, each player puts a marker on the '8' spot on the money 'economy' track and 2nd marker on to the '0' spot on the victory point 'economy' track.
• Give each player a player board and 24 discs, 2 disc go on each of the board's 12 upgrades. Then place 2 meeples on to the board. Finally, place a cube on to the combat track.
• Shuffle the player deck and deal 2 to each player. Each player chooses 1 to keep and discards the other. Each card has 3 objectives, place 1 meeple on to each of the objectives.
• Nearly there! Finally deal 8 project cards to each player. Each player may then keep 4 of them, they can also put a card into the 'in progress' area next to their player board. Remaining project cards are discarded.
• Wait, one more thing. Deal out money to each player. How much depends on the starting turn order.

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Player objective card.

Player aid.

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So now we're ready!
The basic principle of Maracaibo is to travel from location to location in a loop from and back to Havana. Stopping at different places will allow players to perform different actions in pursuit of victory points.
A player's turn consists of 3 phases, sailing, main action & drawing cards.

• Sailing: A player can choose to move their ship meeple 1-7 spaces on the main track.
• Main action: A player's main action will depend on where they stopped their ship meeple. Generally, ships will stop at cities or villages. But can be quest tiles or 'assistant' actions. 
• Drawing cards: Once a player has completed their main action; if the project cards in their hand is below their card limit, they can acquire project cards up to that limit. This can be done by drawing blindly from the deck, or buying any of the face-up project cards.

​Now let's talk about the different types of 'stops'.

• City tiles: When a player stops at a city, they can spend the appropriate project cards to supply the city with what it wants. Upon doing this, the active player removes one of the discs from their player board and places it on the relevant city tile. That need has now been met and no other player can supply that good in this turn. City tiles have a second action that players can complete (See below for more information.).
• Village spaces: In most cases, an 'empty' space on the main track is usually a village. A player who stops in a village space can potentially have more than one action at their disposal. The further they moved, the more actions they get. They get 1-3 actions. When at a village, there are 3 different actions a player can perform. 1, discard all project cards and gain 1 coin. 2, gain a coin. 3, buy a project card, either from their hand or planning area. Alternatively, the active player may invest in a prestige building instead of buying a project card.
• Quest tile: If a player stops on a space with a quest tile and they have the required resources, then they can buy the quest tile and place it on their player board.
• Assistant: Players will be given the opportunity (By Project cards or quest tiles.) to place assistants (Meeples.) on certain spaces. When they come around again and stop on that space, they can choose to activate the assistant. What the assistant does depends on what card/tile was used to place it in the first place.

Actions perform a variety of actions as explained below and can be triggered in a variety of ways, such as project cards, quest tiles and locations, as well as assistants.
Let's start with city actions:

• Gain victory points.
• Gain money.
• Gain meeples: Players only start with 2 meeples, which can quickly be used up as an assistant or to pay a cost.
• Remove a disc from a player board.
• Gain noble rank with a nation (More on this below.).
• Increase a nation's reputation (More on this below.).
• Gain combat points (More on combat below.).
• Move the the player's explorer meeple: Moving an explorer meeple along the exploration track will earn player's other things from this list!
• Increase victory point economy: Victory point economy is different to gaining victory points. Victory points earned on the economy track are scored at the end of each of the 4 rounds in the game. Thus points earned early on will be scored multiple times.
• Increase coin economy: This works a bit like the victory point economy, except players start at '8' on the track and it earns players money at the start of each subsequent round (Except for the end of the 4th round, in which case it scores victory points.).

So I've mentioned influence, reputation and combat above, how do they work?

• Reputation: There are 3 nations (England, France & Spain.) vying for influence in the region. The more 'rank' a player has with a nation, the more points they score from that nation during the endgame.
• Influence: Each nation has an influence track that shows the level of their influence. Why is this important to the players? The victory points a player scores from a nation can be multiplied if that nation's influence is high enough. Reputation is tracked by removing influence markers from a nations influence track and placing it on to a location on the board.
• Combat: When combat it initiated a combat token is drawn, then the player who initiated combat can choose which faction to support (There may be a cost or reward associated with this according to the token.), then the player can spend their points to increase their rank with the nation they supported. They can also spend combat points to put influence markers on to the board. This can 'oust' another nation's influence (Only 1 influence marker is allowed per location.). 

Players keep taking turns until a round ends. A round continues until any player reaches space 22. There's a game mechanism that prevents a player immediately ending a round (Players must stop at space 21 first.). Then the following actions occur.
Players can purchase a project card or gain 2 VP.
The money and victory point economy tracks are dealt with.
A new prestige building is revealed and new quest cards are placed on the board as required.
The new first player is the player who ended the previous turn.

Endgame
Play continues until the end of the final round.

Points can come from project cards, player boards, prestige buildings, rank with nations and of course the scoring track.
Final points are tallied and highest score wins. ​

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Player area at the game end.

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Game board at game end.

Overall
TLDR; right? Although I've probably made it sound more complicated than it actually is.

Maracaibo definitely sits at the heavier end of the complexity scale.
Some of this complexity is down to rules, but much of it is due to having so many things going on at the same time. Not only is there the main track and project cards and ship grades and personal objectives, there's the exploration track. Then there's the influence and rank tracks. I've probably missed something too!

All of these are ways to score points

It's a lot for a player to think about and take in, particularly with potentially very  limited turns!
There may be 22 spaces on the main track, but if a player races round, they can end the round after about 4 turns. A sneaky player can end the game quite quickly and if players don't pay attention, they may get caught flat footed.

So players need to think of ways to optimise their strategy, manage their resources and play to the strengths of their personal objectives.

They also need to keep an eye on what other players may be doing with regards movement and also to influence and rank, high rank with a high influence nation can be the source of a lot of victory points.
This is not a confrontational game by any means, but influence represents the only way players can mess with each other (Even though it's indirectly.). Lowering a nation's influence after another player has increased their rank with that nation can cost them a lot of victory points.

Its mechanics suits its themes fairly well as what players are doing is following trade routes whilst buying and selling.

Whilst Maracaibo is not the most complex or heaviest of games, but it's complex enough.
It's a game that will take a couple plays to understand a learn, so it's not very accessible. But if you like heavier games, then you'll be used to that.

If you like heavier games and you like the theme, you'll probably like Maracaibo, although it typically requires a few hours to complete, around 3 hours I'd say.

For me, I'd like to play it again, but it sits close to the upper limits of complexity I like dealing with.