Maracaibo - A Gaming Rules! Review 

For a 2 player game, Undaunted : Normandy would be my game of 2019 but at a higher player count it is certainly Maracaibo. There is so much variety in the cards and events, and the way that a player can choose the pace of the game, that it is likely to maintain my interest over many plays. As soon as we played it we decided to have another game immediately. Then another the next morning. Great review.

A nice and fair review. Thanks.

Of the "big" Pfister games I played GWT, Maracaibo, and Mombasa, and so far Maracaibo ranks third but just because the other two are incredibly good. I'd still play Maracaibo any time. Have yet to play Blackout Hong Kong, hope to do it soon.

Jesus Christ, we are 100% waiting for it in Russia this summer. Thank you, Paul. Ready to obtain.

We've played 4-5 games now, 2p, with the campaign and I've also played one 3p game. The story is very simple but I do love how the board changes with the story. As great as this game is, it doesn't beat Great Western Trail which is just pure excellence from start to finish.

Great review as usual 👍 You spoil us Mr. Grogan. Have to say that I only now, after three plays, am starting to get a grip of the combat and different synergy tokens 😅

I am looking forward to the story mode playing of this game. Might even do it solo. However, I have heard the normal game is redundant and there is only one strategy to win -- influence. Always enjoy your reviews Paul

Great review, thank you.

Thanks for sharing! I like the game a lot for the points you made. I agree on everything you mentioned. Well done. As you mentioned, would be nice to have indentions in the player board for the discs, as is done in Scythe. I have only played the game '2 handed' to try and get a feel for what strategy works the best. Also, to your point, it is complex, so it takes a long time to teach and understand the rules. When I play I find that the majority of points come from combat. Completing quests and the exploration aspects don't seem to score as many. Course, I'm probably not playing it the best.

If the theme is putting you off, does that also count for games set in ancient Rome Greece, Egypt, Babylon, China or Japan?

Its a fun game. My main issue with it is the board design. The tile stacks are in a poor spot and it makes some things harder to see. Everything is crammed together making it overly fiddly. I wish they would have just made a bigger board with less clutter. I hear the expansion will bring double layer player boards which will be awesome though.

Should I try Great Western Trail before diving into this? Nice review by the way!

Which would you pick between Maracaibo and Cooper Island (with the added solo mode)?

No Ned to apologize for anything of the past , imagine WWII wargames banned due to the absurdity of men actions...

Did you play through the entire campaign?

Nothing about randomness?

Laborious bit about the theme...

I have 64 A project cards, rules say 56

Those who are inclined to find offense with the historical aspect of this game are perhaps just as likely to take offense with GWT's theme of meat production, or the themes of other games and how they relate to the production of greenhouse gases (not to mention how the production and shipment of the game itself contributes), and on and on. I mean, sometimes people even turn on an electric light in order to play the game. Gasp! My point is that the politicization of EVERYTHING is a fool's game and inclined to make people miserable. My experience is that those who do politicize everything, often to fuel a sanctimonious 'guilt of humanity', are the most unhappy people I know. Why play to these people, Paul? By holding to a particular ideology, or mimicking it ad absurdum, I'm sure we could give almost every boardgame this "treatment". Then we could "justify" how, by playing a boardgame, it makes us evil beings, complicit in the exploitation of the environment, animals or other bipedal beings. I mean, how do we justify violence in the face of the 'lived experience' of zombies? Don't we care about the obviously human-imposed wealth disparity between gnomes and goblins? Do we need to buy offsets for the CO2 emissions of wooden "cars" we race, "trains" we operate, or cardboard "buildings" we build? What does our greed for victory points say about us? And don't get me started on the gender issues of the Klingon Empire... Or, maybe it's just a boardgame? Shouldn't boardgames serve as an escape from the drudgery of the everyday? So what is the point of infusing touchy 21st century politics into boardgaming? If a historical treatment is necessary, maybe, just maybe, we can understand how much better things are now for almost every human on earth compared to 400 years ago. (That we have time to play boardgames, for one!) Maybe we can attribute that correctly to the ideas, technologies and traditions developed since the time frame of this game. Maybe we can take pride in how our species has advanced and to what extent we have suppressed much of what made people behave the ways they did in the past? I'm talking to that great majority who are inclined to hold a moderate view (or no view at all) and not those described in my first paragraph.