Marrakesh

There was a time when Mr. Stefan was one of those euro designers you simply had to catch while you could. Then came the cash-grabs, and plenty of people lost touch with his greatness. So I say: get Marrakesh, put the Tower aside, and enjoy one of the tastiest point-salad experiences I have played. It has loads of excellent, clever mechanisms, and anyone who disagrees because they think it is primarily “eurogamer” can go play Elf Creek Games.

At the centre of the experience is the cube tower and the uncertainty it brings: its luck is not merely a random obstacle, but something you have to factor into your decisions. Marrakesh is not presented here as a dry collection of actions or a sequence of obvious optimal moves; its pleasure lies precisely in the way its many mechanisms knit together into a rich point-salad construction.

Interaction mainly comes through that shared, unpredictable pressure from the tower and through the importance of the river. The expansion adds nomads, which serve as a good safeguard against a potentially unfavourable cube-tower result, and camels, which in their own way slightly reduce the river’s importance. I will not invent a detailed turn order that the description does not provide; what matters is that these elements add choices and soften specific pressures in the base game.

My final verdict remains emphatic: for this decade of my life, which is ending soon — haha — I consider it Feld’s best. It is lavish, full of ideas and, above all, epic.

Updated session

In the later play we used the expansion with camels and nomads. My opinion not only did not change, but became stronger: the game grew more lavish while also becoming more interesting. Especially important is the different inner floor for the cube tower, which makes it a little harsher and more impartial. The repeated later note confirms exactly the same impression.