I played two times with my wife and sons (15 and 12, experienced players) and i really liked the step-by-step introduction to the game, it felt just right. We all enjoyed the tension moments when scouting for resources and the short fights . For us the complexity fits perfect.
Alright, we are three games in and is actually quite some fun, but after a game like Maracaibo it struggles meeting the expectations for me too. Still it is probably at least a 7 for me, because I enjoy how quick it plays and that it offers enough tactical and also some strategical decision to keep me engaged. What I have to add is that you guys might want to take a step back from where you are in gaming and try to comprehend again how people who don't play many games feel. For my mother who joined for the first game this was so much more complicated than Isle of Skye. She even won the latter in her second game when she played it years ago, but here she had to go through the steps of a turn again and again that we ended up playing 2.5 hours. If new players are not familiar with any engine building beyond Splendor or more turn steps than maybe Small World this is really overwhelming for them. Yet my mother just called and said she wants to watch a rule video and play again because she still enjoyed it.
It's an interesting suggestion, and we do try to look at games "objectively" when we play them. We have played and reviewed games that weren't for us, but that we thought would be great games for other people. Of course, we have our biases in what we like/dislike, but we always try to look at the difference between bad and not for us! What you will get here, is of course our tastes and our feelings for the game, and that is why the playthrough is also such a good way to see if you might like the game even if we didnt. Our negatives in the review might be positives for you as well :D
@@BoardGamingRamblings Oh yes, I totally understand and actually it is one of the reasons I like your channel so much, because you give honest opinions and don't back off from neutral and negative reviews. My point here was mostly about the complexity, as you both used the expression "simple game" so many times that it gives the impression you are talking about a family game everyone can just jump in. And that was my only criticism that this game is definitely not as simple as you might feel. To my wife and myself it is also very easy to get into, but when I saw my mother struggling I immediately understood why this game is so much harder to get into than the beforementioned ones. You have quite some mechanisms here. Yes, they are all mostly at a basic level, but you got somewhat deck building, tableau building, tactical movement, unforeseeable decision making, resource management, strict turn order with many steps, actions in your opponent's turns, and so on. And all of that combined objectively does not make this game a "simple game" ;-) I would even say this is heavier to get jinto than Concordia which is imho the threshold of a medium game. No hard feelings, I hope you understand it as constructivism :-)
Pfister is my favorite designer, but I had the same reaction as you guys did the more I learned about the game. All the warning signs were there: 1) It was a lighter game. 2) It has a campaign. 3) *new* sleeving mechanic that determines how many resources you can get. There are positives in the game, I think the setting, art and components are nice. But that's pretty much it.
There are absolutely positives to the game, and I think some people will like it a lot, but it sadly wasn’t for us! Looking forward to see what he has coming next 🤩
Wow wow wowwy wowowowow! So entertaining (as usual). You can tell how much you both love games SO MUCH because when you don't like a game I can feel the pain... Like it's a personal offense lol. I get the feel of when parents say to their kids "I'm not angry... I'm just disappointed" Ouch! On the bright side at least that's one game I don't have to buy! Now back to scouring the interwebs for a copy of Eldervale 🙃
There are so many games, and when playing a game I don't like from a designer I don't know (or haven't been wowed by before) I don't really mind. It's always when playing a new game from one of the favorites, and it's a letdown, that I get sad. The biggest feeling like that, was still with Merlin :P Thanks for watching, hope you'll find that Eldervale in the wild soon!
My wallet says "thanks". Fun factor was definitely not "through the roof" on that one. I just watched a very positive review of that game elsewhere so stay positive Alexander!!
Glad to not always be the opener of wallets! Heard many people have spend loads of money because of us 😂 As always, thanks for watching, and for taking time to make a comment :D
I setup this game today, I am reading the rules, watching this video, etc - 1) This game seems to have a weird ratio of rules to depth. Lots of small rules and it is still a light game. 2) Coming of the previous comment, as most of his games, it simply has too many small phases... The experience gets very choppy... It is the card phase, the book phase, the movement phase, the optional extra buy phase, the build phase, the follow phase... His games usually needs a table manager to make things move forward!
I felt like the game flows ok when you get into it, but there is absolutely a lot of small phases! Let me know if you like the game when you try a few times :) Thanks for watching!
ahahah I just rewatched this review, I completely forgot your thoughts about the game xD I wanted to ask you: do you feel part of your negative feelings towards the it come from the expectations (I mean its weight and what you got from Maracaibo)? Thanks I got CloudAge pretty recently because I have been wanting to try the game for quite a while. I do know the game is lighter than most of Pfister hits. That doesn't bother me. I love Port Royal and Oh My Goods, and my 2nd fav game from him is Blackout Hong Kong - which I feel is a step down in complexity from GWT or Maracaibo. I did hate the rulebook for OMG and the expansion, and I wonder if I am going to have the same problems with CloudAge on that matter xD
It didn't click for me while watching it. I was expecting more, because it's a big box game - Maracaibo/GWT/Mombasa sized, so I thought it would be like those. I'm down for a quick game (1h games for me are quick/30m or less a filler/2h over a proper big game) because sometimes that's all you can fit on the schedule. But they have to be interesting and rewarding, and this wasn't. Still, he has many stellar designs, and there always the next one.
I agree with everthing you said! I’m very happy I found out it was a lighter title ebfore I got the game, or else I would probably be a lot more disappointed! Know I knew what I was going into at least! Alexander is a stellar designer, and I think many people will enjoy this, but it just wasn’t for us! Looking forward to his next design, always!
@@BoardGamingRamblings though the pacing of it is different, I kinda felt like the game played itself, you know? You will move to the next location (probably in the direction of your scoring card), you will fight and put a cube (regardless of outcome), and then maybe do resource gathering or placing those tokens. Once in a while buy an upgrade - which didn't seem to change the gameplay much. It didn't seem like it had many choices, or that the ones presented were significant to impact the overall game.
Feels like Alexander Pfister needs to improve his rulebooks. GWT and Blackout HK were very good but Maracaibo also had a terrible rulebook. It seems like such a simple thing to get right. Anyway, your analysis sounded like how I felt about Maracaibo... Just so-so. But this game looks so nice!! I really wanted to like it, but now I'm going to have to do some more research about whether to purchase or not.
Hmm, actually I saw many very positive reviews regarding CloudAge, some also mentioning that they really liked the rulebook. But I never had a game - including GWT - where everybody said they liked the rulebook. I think some like it shorter, some longer etc. Many different tastes. By the way, rules are not written by the designers but by the publisher.
@@alexxpfister Thanks, that's really interesting to know, I was not aware of who makes what in a game and how much a designer does theirselves. I would love to read a blog into how you design games and what you do yourself etc if you ever decided to do such a thing!
@@alexxpfister that’s an interesting insight that designers don’t write their own rule books. That seems counterintuitive, because who could know the rules of a game more intimately than the designer?
@@alexxpfister wow this fascinates me. When you say that the designer only makes the mechanisms, do you mean that not only do they not write the rule book, but that they also don’t come up with the rules? Just the core mechanisms, and then the game company completes the game and makes the rules with the core mechanism in mind?
It’s obvious this game failed to sell, and is the lowest ranking Pfister game. It’s also obvious he remade this game into ‘pirates of Maracaibo.’ Same map area, move left to right, stop at locations. The upgrades are also the same except now you upgrade a pirate boat instead of a cloud ship. It’s cloudage 1.5. By association with ‘Maracaibo’, ‘pirates of ‘maricaibo’ gets an 8.2 rating (Nov 2023) when it does very little differently than cloudage, proving again that games sell based on theme acceptance and/or association with other highly rated titles from the same designer.
Totally similar. Map mechanism, movement, upgrade mechanisms. These are total steals from cloudage. I watched pirates of Maricabo playthroughs. How can you not be amazed at the blatant rips? Pirates actually went ‘simpler’. Removed some things but it’s clearly Pfister’s attempt to ‘fix/redo’ cloudage. And he knows he can do it because no one bought cloud age. People like pirate themes so he’s smart to do this. I’d also prefer the ‘redo theme’ to cloudage.
There is a map, movement and upgrades in Maracaibo. Also these are mechanisms that are in many, many games. I do not understand how the similar kind of mechanisms makes the game similar? Boonlake also has movement, maps and upgrades. Is that a remake of Maracaibo? Also note that two other designers are named on Pirates of Mracaibo, so Alexander didn’t make it alone. Let’s also put aside the fact that the mechanisms in Cloudage and Pirates are not very similar at all, and that there are other designers who made this game as well, what would be the problem of a designer finding inspiration in his own work? :)
@@BoardGamingRamblings but here you have EXACT BLATANT aspects of one game copied into another, with a new theme pasted on. Maracaibo is not the same. What exactly makes ‘pirates of Maracaibo’ fun for you, when cloudage wasn’t? I have no issue with Pfister making cloudage 1.5 and giving it a new name. He failed, he tried again. He will obviously do much better this time. Not always the case with remakes. He made a good game called ‘mombasa’ that utterly failed as the woke remake “skymines”. There he went in reverse. Had a good game, made it worse. Didn’t sell, and deservedly so. Designer’s repeating their hits, mechanisms, habits, go to’s, is common and can be found in every one of them from Martin Wallace to Knizia. They are all easily spotted from a mile away. I just think it was humorous to see how ‘pirates of m’ so closely models cloudage and now pirates gets an 8.2. YOU KNOW bias is there because people associate it with ‘Maracaibo’, which they already own or read about. “wow, it has maricaibo in the title, must be good!” This is just smart advertising. Guaranteed if Pfister said “F it, I don’t care”, kept the theme of cloud ships planting trees, called it ‘Age of clouds’, with the EXACT same gameplay as ‘pirate of m’, it would be laughed at and a fail from day one. Death by association of a failed title, regardless how good the new version would be. People are very easy to manipulate into sales, and the best way is to link one game in your mind with another one you already bought. I bought pax renaissance and loved it. Now I buy all the pax games because of word association, even though some of them turned out to be utter shite. I still bought it. I recommend Pfister re-release it as ‘great cloud age trail’. And btw, cloudage is a lot more entertaining than ‘Maricaibo’. That game was an abomination.
I see you say there are similarities, even things that are the exact same, but I don’t understand what aspects are the same? Moving from one side to the other? Like most race games or games where you move on a map? Upgrading, like a billiong other euros? I’m not trying to be difficult here, I just do not understand which things are the same?
Thank you Alexis! Was there any rules problems here, or did you mean that we should explain the rules more? We do have a mistake from time to time in playthroughs, and I try my best to make that not happen, but it probably will here and there. As to explain the rules, that is not something we tend to do on this channel, and we’ll probably never start, hehe! So many great channels teach rules already! Thanks for watching 🤩
@@BoardGamingRamblings Sorry for my english :) No error at all, just more details to understand better the playthrough. I've been a little bit lost on this one. The turn order is strange :) But great job anyway! :)
No worries at all! We try to make it clear enough to follow, so sorry if we didn’t do that here! Thanks for the feedback! We always try to get better :)
Sorry to hear it won’t be your favourite Pfister game, maybe the next one:😀. Thanks for doing a video!
Thanks for watching, Alexander! We are still huge fans, and cannot wait to see what you’re coming up with next! 😁
Always looking forward to your games! There are so many great ones as well 😄
I played two times with my wife and sons (15 and 12, experienced players) and i really liked the step-by-step introduction to the game, it felt just right. We all enjoyed the tension moments when scouting for resources and the short fights . For us the complexity fits perfect.
Alright, we are three games in and is actually quite some fun, but after a game like Maracaibo it struggles meeting the expectations for me too. Still it is probably at least a 7 for me, because I enjoy how quick it plays and that it offers enough tactical and also some strategical decision to keep me engaged.
What I have to add is that you guys might want to take a step back from where you are in gaming and try to comprehend again how people who don't play many games feel. For my mother who joined for the first game this was so much more complicated than Isle of Skye. She even won the latter in her second game when she played it years ago, but here she had to go through the steps of a turn again and again that we ended up playing 2.5 hours. If new players are not familiar with any engine building beyond Splendor or more turn steps than maybe Small World this is really overwhelming for them. Yet my mother just called and said she wants to watch a rule video and play again because she still enjoyed it.
It's an interesting suggestion, and we do try to look at games "objectively" when we play them. We have played and reviewed games that weren't for us, but that we thought would be great games for other people.
Of course, we have our biases in what we like/dislike, but we always try to look at the difference between bad and not for us!
What you will get here, is of course our tastes and our feelings for the game, and that is why the playthrough is also such a good way to see if you might like the game even if we didnt. Our negatives in the review might be positives for you as well :D
@@BoardGamingRamblings Oh yes, I totally understand and actually it is one of the reasons I like your channel so much, because you give honest opinions and don't back off from neutral and negative reviews.
My point here was mostly about the complexity, as you both used the expression "simple game" so many times that it gives the impression you are talking about a family game everyone can just jump in. And that was my only criticism that this game is definitely not as simple as you might feel. To my wife and myself it is also very easy to get into, but when I saw my mother struggling I immediately understood why this game is so much harder to get into than the beforementioned ones. You have quite some mechanisms here. Yes, they are all mostly at a basic level, but you got somewhat deck building, tableau building, tactical movement, unforeseeable decision making, resource management, strict turn order with many steps, actions in your opponent's turns, and so on. And all of that combined objectively does not make this game a "simple game" ;-)
I would even say this is heavier to get jinto than Concordia which is imho the threshold of a medium game.
No hard feelings, I hope you understand it as constructivism :-)
Pfister is my favorite designer, but I had the same reaction as you guys did the more I learned about the game. All the warning signs were there:
1) It was a lighter game.
2) It has a campaign.
3) *new* sleeving mechanic that determines how many resources you can get.
There are positives in the game, I think the setting, art and components are nice. But that's pretty much it.
There are absolutely positives to the game, and I think some people will like it a lot, but it sadly wasn’t for us! Looking forward to see what he has coming next 🤩
Wow wow wowwy wowowowow! So entertaining (as usual). You can tell how much you both love games SO MUCH because when you don't like a game I can feel the pain... Like it's a personal offense lol. I get the feel of when parents say to their kids "I'm not angry... I'm just disappointed" Ouch! On the bright side at least that's one game I don't have to buy! Now back to scouring the interwebs for a copy of Eldervale 🙃
There are so many games, and when playing a game I don't like from a designer I don't know (or haven't been wowed by before) I don't really mind. It's always when playing a new game from one of the favorites, and it's a letdown, that I get sad. The biggest feeling like that, was still with Merlin :P
Thanks for watching, hope you'll find that Eldervale in the wild soon!
@@BoardGamingRamblings Uggg (stares at his unopened copy of Merlin on the shelf) 🤣
My wallet says "thanks". Fun factor was definitely not "through the roof" on that one. I just watched a very positive review of that game elsewhere so stay positive Alexander!!
Glad to not always be the opener of wallets! Heard many people have spend loads of money because of us 😂 As always, thanks for watching, and for taking time to make a comment :D
😂lmao with the 'AP death stare' @40:10
The best stare!
yes, finally! now lets watch :3
Hope you liked the video!
I setup this game today, I am reading the rules, watching this video, etc - 1) This game seems to have a weird ratio of rules to depth. Lots of small rules and it is still a light game. 2) Coming of the previous comment, as most of his games, it simply has too many small phases... The experience gets very choppy... It is the card phase, the book phase, the movement phase, the optional extra buy phase, the build phase, the follow phase... His games usually needs a table manager to make things move forward!
I felt like the game flows ok when you get into it, but there is absolutely a lot of small phases! Let me know if you like the game when you try a few times :) Thanks for watching!
I was on the fence about this one. Pass. Thanks for this review!
ahahah I just rewatched this review, I completely forgot your thoughts about the game xD
I wanted to ask you: do you feel part of your negative feelings towards the it come from the expectations (I mean its weight and what you got from Maracaibo)? Thanks
I got CloudAge pretty recently because I have been wanting to try the game for quite a while. I do know the game is lighter than most of Pfister hits. That doesn't bother me. I love Port Royal and Oh My Goods, and my 2nd fav game from him is Blackout Hong Kong - which I feel is a step down in complexity from GWT or Maracaibo.
I did hate the rulebook for OMG and the expansion, and I wonder if I am going to have the same problems with CloudAge on that matter xD
It didn't click for me while watching it. I was expecting more, because it's a big box game - Maracaibo/GWT/Mombasa sized, so I thought it would be like those. I'm down for a quick game (1h games for me are quick/30m or less a filler/2h over a proper big game) because sometimes that's all you can fit on the schedule. But they have to be interesting and rewarding, and this wasn't.
Still, he has many stellar designs, and there always the next one.
I agree with everthing you said! I’m very happy I found out it was a lighter title ebfore I got the game, or else I would probably be a lot more disappointed! Know I knew what I was going into at least! Alexander is a stellar designer, and I think many people will enjoy this, but it just wasn’t for us! Looking forward to his next design, always!
@@BoardGamingRamblings though the pacing of it is different, I kinda felt like the game played itself, you know? You will move to the next location (probably in the direction of your scoring card), you will fight and put a cube (regardless of outcome), and then maybe do resource gathering or placing those tokens. Once in a while buy an upgrade - which didn't seem to change the gameplay much.
It didn't seem like it had many choices, or that the ones presented were significant to impact the overall game.
I agree! There are choices, but for me they didn’t seem to be very impactful!
Feels like Alexander Pfister needs to improve his rulebooks. GWT and Blackout HK were very good but Maracaibo also had a terrible rulebook. It seems like such a simple thing to get right.
Anyway, your analysis sounded like how I felt about Maracaibo... Just so-so. But this game looks so nice!! I really wanted to like it, but now I'm going to have to do some more research about whether to purchase or not.
Hmm, actually I saw many very positive reviews regarding CloudAge, some also mentioning that they really liked the rulebook. But I never had a game - including GWT - where everybody said they liked the rulebook. I think some like it shorter, some longer etc. Many different tastes. By the way, rules are not written by the designers but by the publisher.
@@alexxpfister Thanks, that's really interesting to know, I was not aware of who makes what in a game and how much a designer does theirselves. I would love to read a blog into how you design games and what you do yourself etc if you ever decided to do such a thing!
@@alexxpfister that’s an interesting insight that designers don’t write their own rule books. That seems counterintuitive, because who could know the rules of a game more intimately than the designer?
@@shanerion @Nik Radmore The designer only makes the mechanisms of a game. But I get the rules to check.
@@alexxpfister wow this fascinates me. When you say that the designer only makes the mechanisms, do you mean that not only do they not write the rule book, but that they also don’t come up with the rules? Just the core mechanisms, and then the game company completes the game and makes the rules with the core mechanism in mind?
It’s obvious this game failed to sell, and is the lowest ranking Pfister game. It’s also obvious he remade this game into ‘pirates of Maracaibo.’ Same map area, move left to right, stop at locations. The upgrades are also the same except now you upgrade a pirate boat instead of a cloud ship. It’s cloudage 1.5. By association with ‘Maracaibo’, ‘pirates of ‘maricaibo’ gets an 8.2 rating (Nov 2023) when it does very little differently than cloudage, proving again that games sell based on theme acceptance and/or association with other highly rated titles from the same designer.
Interesting points of views, but the two games doesn’t play very similar at all. Two very different beasts. One is also a lot of fun 😂
Totally similar. Map mechanism, movement, upgrade mechanisms. These are total steals from cloudage. I watched pirates of Maricabo playthroughs. How can you not be amazed at the blatant rips? Pirates actually went ‘simpler’. Removed some things but it’s clearly Pfister’s attempt to ‘fix/redo’ cloudage. And he knows he can do it because no one bought cloud age. People like pirate themes so he’s smart to do this. I’d also prefer the ‘redo theme’ to cloudage.
There is a map, movement and upgrades in Maracaibo. Also these are mechanisms that are in many, many games. I do not understand how the similar kind of mechanisms makes the game similar?
Boonlake also has movement, maps and upgrades. Is that a remake of Maracaibo?
Also note that two other designers are named on Pirates of Mracaibo, so Alexander didn’t make it alone.
Let’s also put aside the fact that the mechanisms in Cloudage and Pirates are not very similar at all, and that there are other designers who made this game as well, what would be the problem of a designer finding inspiration in his own work? :)
@@BoardGamingRamblings but here you have EXACT BLATANT aspects of one game copied into another, with a new theme pasted on. Maracaibo is not the same. What exactly makes ‘pirates of Maracaibo’ fun for you, when cloudage wasn’t? I have no issue with Pfister making cloudage 1.5 and giving it a new name. He failed, he tried again. He will obviously do much better this time. Not always the case with remakes. He made a good game called ‘mombasa’ that utterly failed as the woke remake “skymines”. There he went in reverse. Had a good game, made it worse. Didn’t sell, and deservedly so. Designer’s repeating their hits, mechanisms, habits, go to’s, is common and can be found in every one of them from Martin Wallace to Knizia. They are all easily spotted from a mile away.
I just think it was humorous to see how ‘pirates of m’ so closely models cloudage and now pirates gets an 8.2. YOU KNOW bias is there because people associate it with ‘Maracaibo’, which they already own or read about. “wow, it has maricaibo in the title, must be good!” This is just smart advertising. Guaranteed if Pfister said “F it, I don’t care”, kept the theme of cloud ships planting trees, called it ‘Age of clouds’, with the EXACT same gameplay as ‘pirate of m’, it would be laughed at and a fail from day one. Death by association of a failed title, regardless how good the new version would be. People are very easy to manipulate into sales, and the best way is to link one game in your mind with another one you already bought. I bought pax renaissance and loved it. Now I buy all the pax games because of word association, even though some of them turned out to be utter shite. I still bought it.
I recommend Pfister re-release it as ‘great cloud age trail’. And btw, cloudage is a lot more entertaining than ‘Maricaibo’. That game was an abomination.
I see you say there are similarities, even things that are the exact same, but I don’t understand what aspects are the same?
Moving from one side to the other? Like most race games or games where you move on a map? Upgrading, like a billiong other euros? I’m not trying to be difficult here, I just do not understand which things are the same?
"There's nothing to spoil really", lol
Haha 😂
Thanks for all those good playthrough! Maybe just take 10min to be more precise about rules ;)
Thank you Alexis! Was there any rules problems here, or did you mean that we should explain the rules more?
We do have a mistake from time to time in playthroughs, and I try my best to make that not happen, but it probably will here and there.
As to explain the rules, that is not something we tend to do on this channel, and we’ll probably never start, hehe! So many great channels teach rules already!
Thanks for watching 🤩
@@BoardGamingRamblings Sorry for my english :) No error at all, just more details to understand better the playthrough. I've been a little bit lost on this one. The turn order is strange :) But great job anyway! :)
No worries at all! We try to make it clear enough to follow, so sorry if we didn’t do that here! Thanks for the feedback! We always try to get better :)
Simple game then... Oh well it's a hard pass. I wait for his maricabro expansion next year.
Hard pass for me too.
you could at least wait for other opinions - I guess there will also be different ones ;)
@@tinojokic2102 yeah should do but. Really only into heavy and medium games. So a light game is already no no for me.
@@stevensum2011 Ok I understand - I would say it is a medium game, like arnak or architects - but also there are different opinions.
There is a Maracaibo expansion coming next year? That is interesting!
Do you sell any used boardgames
Yes, absolutely! We try to get rid of quite a few games every year!