Pirating continued
After playing 🌴 Maracaibo last time we didn’t actually put it away. It spent the week set up on the table, as we still wanted to explore it further.🤩 This time we mixed in the content from the expansion Uprising, and tried out one of the co-op modes “Free the Caribbean”.✌️
The basic game has you fighting alongside three different nations, placing their ownership cubes on the map and gaining influence with them. This is an important part of scoring as well. In the co-op scenario “Free the Caribbean” it works a bit differently. During setup 18 cubes are placed on the cities and villages of the map - you have two goals: get rid of all cubes by the end of the 4th round, and score more than the automa ‘Jacques’.👍
Jacques is a must, or else you would have all the time to visit every location and get stronger. He doesn’t do much, just takes away some things and tries to rush the round-end - and also gets huge amounts of points at the end of every round. I don’t like these types of bots, it doesn’t really mimic a human player😒 (the game does have another solo-mode automa ‘Jean’, that is more akin to a human player).
🧾 We also tried the competitive story mode: in this you draw cards that tell a story. 😊 Story tokens are placed on the map and you have to collect these to advance the story. At the end of every round you check for completed missions. Some of these will have you pick an outcome that changes the layout of the board with legacy tiles. So the board will change every round bringing new things to consider.
The legacy tiles are an awesome part of the game - you have a huge amount of setup variability even without playing the story mode. Some areas of the board will be covered and changed by these tiles. Maybe a new city forms where there was only a village, or a storm is slowing the movement on a certain route.🤔
To summarize, it is nice to have the co-op mode as an option, but we didn’t like it too much.😑 Many of the mechanics shine in competitive play - not so much in co-operative. You can’t really help each other much. However the story mode is quite clever🙃
