Pirates of Maracaibo

As you might guess from the name, in Pirates of Maracaibo we are the mischievous corsairs of the title, sailing the Caribbean Sea up to no good. Over three rounds you’ll loot and plunder and (possibly) bury your treasures, with the goal being to emerge as the richest pirate at the end of it all.

The game is set-up partly using an Exploration board – representing Maracaibo itself and its surrounds – and partly using three smaller boards and a clutch of cards that are laid out to represent the ocean – see pics above. Players start at the most westerly point and take turns sailing east, moving up to three spaces at a time. You can use these movements to go up or down but you must move forward at least one column on the map. When you arrive at a card (-you cannot stop on the three boards) you take an action there. One action is simply to take five doubloons from the bank, no matter what the card says. The others all depend on whether the card is a Location, an Improvement, or a Residence.

Improvements are simple: they can be claimed for yourself. You pay the price on the card and remove it from the map (replacing it with a new one from the deck) and add it to your personal Ship board. Some improvements give an instant benefit, and others an ongoing benefit: we won’t list them all here (there are quite a few!) but they all help you in some way: getting more money, or making future purchases or raiding easier for example.

Locations all trigger the value of the game’s three treasure types – gold, emeralds and pearls – climbing, which is potentially good if you have a lot of a high-value treasure type at the end of the game. They also give you an Upgrade for your ship, where fill a spot in the boat with a grey cube to get the reward printed there. Again, they vary hugely and can’t all be listed here. Then finally the location will also give you an action as well.

Some of these actions are about raiding. Raiding involves rolling three dice – one for each treasure type – and then choosing one of the dice to cash in, for treausure/points/cash – or some combination thereof. This is the way you’ll fill up your Hideout board with treasure – and there’s also a Digging action which allows you to bury it, for some small rewards now and points at the end of the game. It’s very much worth bearing in mind that when you raid for treasure, however, you simultaneously devalue it! So players collectively work to keep these values up by visiting locations. Another action is Exploring, that lets you move your explorer around Venezuela and take the rewards on the places they stop. Pushing your Explorer forward is good for another reason: having them go further is worth more points at the end of the game.

The last card type is the Residence, into which you can pay to place a token of your own colour. These are all about endgame scoring: you might get points for having a particular type of treasure, or having collected a particular type of card, and so on. Residences are expensive!

Each round will end when someone reaches Maracaibo itself, allowing the other players one final turn. But there are also rewards to be found in the city: an instant upgrade, and a choice of actions. The first player there will also get a second upgrade and six points, making each round a low-level race as well as an exploration. Then all the boats reset for the next round, with players gaining income from their claimed cards and upgrades. At the end of the third round, players score points across a few different categories: how far their explorer got, how much cash they have, the worth of their treasure, and any Quest cards they’ve completed. You begin the game with one Quest card, giving you some strategic direction (for example, Have at least three emeralds by the end of the game) but there are ways to collect more during play.

Sam says

I have two responses to this game. One is that the sheer number of icons feels like a weird existential joke – over 90 of them in the glossary, although in fairness these are often using the same symbology. My other response is that I rather like the game. Inspired by the original Maracaibo, this is – iconography notwithstanding – a simpler, speedier, undertaking. I found the original interesting but unwieldy both in terms of rules and theme. Pirates of Maracaibo seems to be sidestepping both: perhaps it’s less mechanically interesting as a result, but if your gaming fix is found in building something up (-here, your boat upgrades and cards) in order to compare your fortunes at the end, the game offers that experience. Maybe it’s more Errol Flynn than Madame Ching, but it does have raids and treasure and burying: a lot of boxes ticked in theory, although my main sense of the game is that the ‘engine-building’ is where it’s at. It doesn’t tell a story in the way Merchants and Marauders does, for example, but it clings on – just about – to its piratical setting, in a tempest of graphical referencing. There’s even a little shenanigans, if you look hard enough.

Take That!

Pretty minimal. Players can, for example, try to devalue a treasure others are collecting. But it's far from the game's central focus.
Fidget Factor!

Moderate, potentially climbing with more players. We'd say stick with 2 or 3 unless you're happy to spend a couple of hours on it.
Brain Burn!

It's a combination of simple rhythm (move, take an action) but a multitude of small options around it. Combining the two in the most productive way is the challenge.
Again Again!

Set-up is random and the new cards that come out each game are also numerous.