Avast! A Real Leviathan of a Game!

One of the more buzzed about deep strategy board games of was Maracaibo, from designer Alexander Pfister, about the exploration of the Caribbean in the 17th century. I had a chance to try it out, and I can see what so many players are liking about it. Yet I also felt that is was not a game ideal for my group.

There are a lot of mechanisms at play in Maracaibo. A lot. Too many to coherently summarize here. Suffice it to say players take turns sailing their ship meeple around various Caribbean islands, stopping at the location that corresponds to the actions they want to trigger. Pathways on the board mandate travel in one direction, with a few spurs here and there to break off on. You're also playing cards from hand in a soft-touch set collection system, paying to hire cards (people, ships, etc.) that provide you permanent powers for the rest of the game, and even occasionally advancing a team of explorers through a jungle track along the bottom of the board. One player arriving at the end of the ship path will trigger the end of the round; players each get one more action before that round ends and ships are reset at the start of the track to make the voyage again. After four trips around the board, the game ends.

Let's get right to the heart of why I don't think this game will have staying power in my group: it took us over four hours to play a 4-player game. Now, of course, we were all learning it for the first time. And first time players of any game aren't going to be as fast with their decision making. So I was expecting longer than the declared "30 minutes per player" on the box. I was not prepared to run more than double that time. None of us were.

The thing is, I really don't think any of us were playing especially slow. Maracaibo has a broad and complex decision tree -- too broad, in my view, and it's the reason the game takes so long. Each turn, you must advance your ship from 1 to 7 spaces. Some of those spaces will have tiles that were randomly placed at the start of the game to define the action(s) you can take there. Other spaces will have actions that you and only you can take, if you've set them up in a previous trip around the board. (Or you can bypass them on purpose for points.) Still other spaces lead you to a choice of 3 different possible actions -- 1, 2, or 3 picks, depending on how far your ship moved that turn. Essentially, every turn you take, you face a 3-layer decision tree with a total of at least a dozen possible end points on it. Figuring out what is best is not easy.

For the people who love this game, I suspect this is a key part of the appeal. There's so much to consider! Should you move farther, faster to push an early end to this voyage around the Caribbean? Or should you try to stop at as many places as you can along the way and hope the other players will follow suit? Should you focus on playing cards to build an engine? Battling for status points with the three European nations that figure in endgame scoring? Exploring the jungle? I see the compelling pressures at work in the game. I also wish that just every once in a while, you'd feel like the choice presented to you was easy to make.

Oh, I should also mention that there's a system for upgrading your ship. As you deliver goods to locations around the map, you remove tokens from specific upgrade options on your personal ship board. Remove both of the two tokens for a given upgrade, and it's yours for the rest of the game -- a permanent power to enhance your game. But there are far more choices for upgrades than feel really necessary (about a dozen in all). It's another decision tree with more branches than I think it truly needed to be plenty interesting. And the tracking is precarious; a gentle table nudge can knock it all askew quite easily.

When we finally reached the end of our night-long experience, the score was quite a blowout. Endgame scoring really swings things wildly. It's made up of multiple parts, and it's all fairly opaque -- good for keeping everyone feeling they have a chance all the way through to the end, but pretty rough when you realize too late that you didn't focus on the right things.

Then there's the complexity we didn't even attempt in our first playthrough! The game has a campaign option, with story cards that are used to change the Caribbean over the course of multiple plays. If you can actually wrap your head around everything that Maracaibo has to offer normally, I'll bet there's some compelling material in there.

I would be open to playing Maracaibo again. It did feel good to slowly grasp the elaborate system. It was a rush to have an especially effective turn. But honestly, playing it again feels like a very heavy lift for my group. It would probably still take three hours the next time around, and that's simply more than we're in the market for most of the time. The game would need to be exceptional, and not just good, to be worth the time and effort.

I give Maracaibo a B-. If your group is into more elaborate and time-consuming games with complex strategic choices, then you should consider giving it a try -- I'd wager you'll like it more than we did. If you like your Euro games short and sweet, steer well clear, lest your ship founder on the rocks.