Maracaibo

In Maracaibo, you play merchant traders and wily mercenaries of the Caribbean in colonial times. You’re not the expansionist empires themselves, but have a vested interest in who controls what, and a growing capacity to change the political landscape on the board.

We can’t possibly break down the rules to Maracaibo here, but as a brief overview: the board shows the region, and the players sail their ships around it, following a clockwise route. On your turn you can move up to seven spaces, stopping at either a village if it is empty, or potentially sharing space at a city. Having stopped, you can now take actions: three basic ones at a village or any number you can afford at a city.

So – actions. As well as the shared board you’ve also your own small board representing your ship, dotted with tokens. If you can removes these tokens, you trigger various upgrades to your ship and/or your abilities in the game. You’ve also a hand of cards. The cards do various things, one of which is represent goods. If you arrive at a city where that good is in demand – it’s shown on the board – you can pay such a card to make improvements on your ship, removing one of those pesky tokens and placing it in the city to show you’ve met the demand for, say, sugar – now the other players are deprived of this opportunity!

Another main action is playing a card from your hand to the table, representing either your crew, influential friends, or even buildings. Playing a card costs money, however, and needless to say the more powerful cards are more expensive. Once played, they generate more power in various ways: more money, more points, assistants waiting for you at particular locations on the board to make an otherwise procedural village action (usually focused on the hand management of discarding/getting new cards or a trickle of money) more productive, as your assistant offers you and you only extra actions when you pause there.

The other action which is worth covering in a little more detail is combat.

If you engage in combat you flip over a combat tile and choose which empire (France, Spain or England) you’re going to fight with. Doing so has two direct impacts on the game. Firstly, a cube representing the empire in question (blue, red or white) is placed on the map to show they are now in control. Secondly, your own influence with that empire increases: influence is tracked on the board itself, and is absolutely key to your success in the game: after all players have sailed around the board four times (-stopping at Havana at the end of each round for income of points and cash) the players will score points according their influence with each of the three empires, and how much they score depends on the state of the empire itself. What this means in practice is a game that begins with a relatively sedate sailing/gathering/improving ambience will disintegrate into a rather more dastardly affair, as your best efforts to keep Spain in control, say, are undermined by others pushing for France.

After the final round there’s a last opportunity to ‘build’ cards to your tableau, then the player with the most points is crowned winner. There is far more going on than we’ve mentioned here, including an explorer track you can trek for extra stuff, synergy tokens that combine with certain cards on your tableau, the various extra actions you can get from your ship and not least the option, should you desire it, to include the legacy tiles, which give you a kind of campaign to play through where story elements that are triggered in one game stay consistent to the next. But this is the gist, in as much as any game like Maracaibo can have one…