Maracaibo

I’m a big fan of Megas Alexandros, but lately I have not had much appetite to bring his games back to the table. The clearest sign was that the expansion for my beloved Maracaibo sat on the shelf for about six months, still in shrink. I had to push myself a little to open it, mostly because fresh stuff from Essen has that magical ability to shove older boxes to the back of the queue for a very, very long time.

In play, the expansion brings five small modules and new cards, without dramatically changing Maracaibo’s core. The main flow is still there: you build your position on the map and try to make the most of the options opening up in front of you, while the nations’ influence remains the part that makes the game genuinely interesting.

The additions also emphasize solo and co-op play — bleh, not for me — while there are asymmetric powers at the home ports for anyone who wants to fold them into the base game. There is also a variant that removes the nations’ influence from the map and replaces it with a small bonus card for set collection; personally, that feels like replacing the liveliest part of the interaction with something distinctly more colourless.

The most tangible gain is the new ship boards, an honest quality-of-life upgrade that helps prevent the game state from falling apart after an unfortunate move. Otherwise, Maracaibo remains as good as I remembered it: a notch harder than GWT, and a notch lighter in both difficulty and length than Boonlake — games with a similar logic and structure, which is probably why I still slightly prefer Blackout. We had a great time, although the four-player table included voices arguing that it should be filed under “three players only.” I’m not sure I agree, but I can see the point: the tempo is probably better there.