Go West

A while back, I wrote about Maracaibo, a board game from designer Alexander Pfister with some intriguing strategic wrinkles... that nevertheless felt like a bit too much game for my play group. Since then, I've learned why the game felt so overwhelming, like two games' worth of complexity stuffed in one: it kind of is exactly that.

Maracaibo is substantially based on the mechanisms of an earlier Pfister game, Great Western Trail, which itself enjoyed a long run in the Top 10 games on Board Game Geek. (It was very recently displaced by the surging Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion.) It's a game about guiding your covered wagon through the pitfalls and opportunities of multiple trips into the western frontier, managing resources and outthinking your opponents. Now that I've played that game, Maracaibo feels to me like it was made for Great Western Trail fans who just wanted more of everything in it. Bsically, I read book two of a series when I really ought to have started with book one. Maracaibo felt like Great Western Trail after you'd bought two or three expansions for it.

When you take your turn in Great Western Trail, you advance your wagon a number of spaces within a set range. There are several factors that might weigh into how far you choose to move. Going further, faster, than any of your opponents can be advantageous. But stopping at spaces you own can be extra friendly to you. Yet of course, it's a resource management game at its core, and sometimes you need certain things and have to stop at the places where you can get them.

Unlike Maracaibo, this moment of choice in Great Western Trail didn't feel too overwhelming to me. There weren't loads of nested "sub-decisions" waiting to trip you up, and it became easier to know what you wanted the more the game went on. The pace of Great Western Trail definitely accelerates as you play, and I think in this case that's a good thing.

Without going deep into the weeds of explaining what is still a rather advanced game overall, I'll say that there are a lot of directions you can go to get your victory points, and it felt like they were all quite viable. (You'd expect that of a game rated this highly by the board game community, but still...) My first experience with Great Western Trail was a three-player game in which all three of us focused primarily on different ways of amassing points. (And yet it didn't feel like we were engaged in simultaneous solitaire.) In the end, we all ended up with fairly competitive scores that made me eager to play again. Maybe if I'd done this a little differently, or that?

There are interesting sources of randomness in the game too -- not enough to seem chaotic, but enough to make obvious that repeat plays could unfold in very different ways. There's a track where tokens representing workers for hire amass during the game, with prices that vary depending on what point of the game they came out. Different playthroughs will make different options more cost effective at different times, and can make certain options unusually scarce or abundant. Any of these things have strong ramifications on the overall texture of the game, while still all existing within a controlled band of what's possible.

Like I said, there's still a lot of game here. Not an overwhelming amount for my tastes, but it certainly would be for many. This is not a gateway into the board game hobby. It's not even the game you'd teach someone first after they grew to like the gateway game. But it's clever and compelling and not super-long like some games that have this much going on. I can see the reasons for its popularity -- and see why a more complicated spiritual successor was made in Maracaibo. (Which, maybe if I get to play a bunch more Great Western Trail, I'd want to revisit.)

I'd give Great Western Trail at least a B+, and clearly trending upward if I get to play it more.