Maracaibo

Although I am a considerable Maracaibo admirer, its expansion sat unopened on the shelf for rather too long. The rules do not make an urgent case for it: five small modules, more cards, and a marked tilt towards solo and co-op are not, on their own, the announcement of a new era.

In base Maracaibo, the centre of gravity is still the nations’ influence on the map. That is where choices acquire comparative weight: each move alters a shared landscape, and players must read the openings they create, seize them, or leave them for somebody else. The interesting decision is which investment on the map deserves your attention now, knowing perfectly well that you are not the only one attending to it.

The expansion enters that structure through asymmetric home-port powers and additional cards. It also supplies new ship boards, a proper quality-of-life improvement that reduces those occasions when one move clumsily overturns the entire game state. The variant that removes national influence from the map and replaces it with a small set-collection bonus card, meanwhile, trades the game’s most interesting system for something notably paler.

As a whole, Maracaibo remains a click heavier than GWT and a click lighter, both in complexity and length, than Boonlake; related engines with their weight distributed differently. Perhaps that is why Blackout still seems the more appealing expression of this particular design language to me.

The game itself was very good, though the table had a serious case for three players rather than four. I would not make it an absolute rule, but I see the argument: the tempo probably clears up. The expansion does not materially move Maracaibo on; the base game remains very good, and it likely finds its best rhythm with three.