Marrakesh

Stefan Feld has designed enough games that it is easy to lose the signal in the volume; Marrakesh is the sort of design that explains why he became a reference point in the first place. It is a lavish, layered construction, not a euro that merely asks you to carry out its procedure correctly.

At its centre is the management of cubes through the cube tower, a system that never promises complete obedience. Your choices pass through that filter of uncertainty, and the tower can genuinely turn against you: planning well is insufficient if you have no way to proceed when your plan does not come back in the form you sent it.

Around that pressure sits a dense network of decisions. The river carries considerable weight at first, while players compete over the opportunities on offer without being handed a clean, safe route through the game. The interesting decision is when to accept the tower’s uncertainty and when to invest elsewhere, so that one poor cube release does not settle the game on its own.

What remains is a substantial, clever game, with mechanisms that have a purpose rather than merely occupying table space. For this phase of Feld’s work, Marrakesh is his best.

Updated session

Further plays with the camels and nomads expansion confirmed the first impression. Nomads provide a meaningful way to mitigate a bad moment from the cube tower; camels slightly reduce the river’s dominance; and the alternative inner base for the tower makes it sterner and less forgiving. It is a fuller Marrakesh, and a more interesting one.