Maracaibo is one of those games I’ve wanted to play for a while.

Now I have!

Set in the Caribbean during the 17th century, players try to increase their influence in three nations in four rounds. The players sail on a round course through the Caribbean, e.g., you have city tiles where you are able to perform various actions or deliver goods to.

Maracaibo Game Play

This is a brief overview of the game, far from comprehensive but includes the important bits.

Players take turns moving their ship between 1-7 spaces along arrows around the islands and take an action on the one you end on.

In a city, you can deliver goods, fight one of the 3 nations for influence etc.., You can move an explorer up their track and take the reward of the space they end on and more…

At a village, you take 1 action if you moved your ship 1-3 spaces, 2 actions for 4-6 spaces and 3 actions
if you moved all 7 spaces.

These actions let you buy cards, fulfil quests and much more.

One of the main things is removing disks from your ship that upgrade your abilities.

Theme

I played a module from the Uprising expansion which had us defending Maracaibo from invaders whereas in the regular game you’re helping them ‘spread influence’… Nice.

Setup

Tokens, cubes, cards and bits and bobs everywhere. Seems like a bit of a nightmare.

Playing with some of the expansion modules makes this worse as you setup differently in places and replace things all over the board.

Components & Artwork

There are very standard euro game components, nothing special.

There isn’t much art around, it’s just bright.

Ease of Teaching

Not so much. The basics are very easy… But there are bits, then this over there and cards and tokens etc

A lot to consider even though it’s all very simple.

Maracaibo Summary

This is basically Great Western Trail with extra steps. The big “rondel” minus deck building and cows.

I say Rondel, it’s more of a time track as it resets when players hit the end. It means that although you get more actions for moving more spaces, more spaces will mean fewer stops per loop.

We played with some expansion content but I’m not sure which. It did change the game a fair bit by “reversing” combat for one.

So while I’ve really breezed over this game in this ‘review’, don’t think that it’s because I didn’t like it.

I do like it I just think there is quite a bit to look at but none of it is interesting when looked at individually. I didn’t even get involved in combat at all and sadly, I didn’t get involved in any end-game scoring cards to my detriment.

So while I don’t think it’s as good as people are making it out to be, it is a decent game and a fun euro if you like to plan and look for combos.

Jesta ThaRogue