Marracash Board Game Review

Year Published: 1996

Players: 3-4

Playing Time: 60 Minutes

The austerity in Marracash is stunning. It makes me weep for board gaming to a small extent, though, because I can’t imagine this game being published to any fanfare here in the 2020s, at least not without numerous mechanical bells & whistles to obfuscate the sharper edges of the original. But that’s what makes it brilliant.

Marracash is primordial. It’s raw. It’s excellent. But it’s indicative of a style of games that you need to seek out specifically if you want to experience, an opinion made even more literal by the fact that this is long out of print as I write this review.

But Stefan Dorra is in the running for my favorite game designer, full stop, and Marracash is in the running for his best game ever. I’m thrilled to expound a bit on both of those things.

Marracash Rundown

Tourists want stuff, and you want their money. As they flood the streets of Marrakech, you’ll be purchasing shops (via auctions) and moving packs of tourists around who will then enter shops that they’re interested in (color-matching, in this case).

And that’s about it. On your turn, you can hold two auctions, move tourists from node to node twice, or perform a single move and a single auction (in that order).

Everything else flows from the spatial and interpersonal dynamics that these actions create.

Shared Incentives as a Mechanical Crux

I buried the lead a bit. You get money for your shops, and more as more tourists enter them. But you also get money for ushering tourists into their preferred shops, yours or anyone else’s.

The kickbacks on this are…considerable.

Many games feature shared incentives between players. You might perform an action that marginally helps another player because you share a common space or goal. But it’s helping you first and foremost.

Marracash dials this idea up to 10, to the point where it dominates your tactical considerations.

Marracash is the only game I can name where:

1. You might willingly take an action that helps another player more than you, because it’s also wildly beneficial to you and doesn’t sink your long-term prospects.
2. It’s entirely possible for the majority of your endgame score (money) to have come on other players’ turns.

The downstream effects of these facts are profound. Tactically, it means that your turn might be spent setting up others to help you as they help themselves, rather than helping yourself directly.

And second, it implies a strong negotiation space wherein you can make deals with other players, point out how well-positioned an enemy player is, collude with 1-2 others to screw over the winning player in a particular area of the board, and otherwise try to scheme yourself into the most beneficial position.

So things like the ability to form symbiotic relationships with other players in certain areas of the board are useful. But of course, as a competitive game, equally useful is the ability to time it perfectly so that you cut off the relationship to avoid kingmaking. Or to form multiple such arrangements that make it difficult to punish you once it’s clear you’re in the lead.

This also affects auctions, because some shops will be worth 25% or more of a winning score, while others will literally never produce income if you’re not careful. Do you overpay for the juiciest real estate, or try to make a less ideal spot profitable after paying peanuts for ownership of it?

Play with the same group enough times and a meta will form as well in regard to these questions, which can be exploited.

Coopetition games – to use a common portmanteau in the industry – aren’t rare. But ones that feature this level of it certainly are.

The Downside of Focused Design

Marracash ticks all my boxes: auctions, negotiations, spatial puzzle on a shared and central board, extremely interactive, shared incentives, simple rules and a manageable play time (even with teaching and max players you’ll assuredly be under 90 minutes).

So why is it so obscure?

Gems get buried in obscurity all the time. Success in the hobby, which has as much to do with marketing as anything else, is not an indicator of quality.

Despite plenty of cred in certain gaming circles, to my eye Stefan Dorra never achieved the type of designer fame he deserves. For Sale is really his only evergreen title, and it’s a timeless game, as much as anything from more lauded names like Kramer and Rosenberg and Knizia. But much of his other work never became mainstream.

I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I suspect it has something to do with how unassuming his games tend to be. Even For Sale isn’t remotely flashy; it just delivers the experience it’s intended to deliver with stunning consistency.

The theme, which leaves even me a touch dry, and the frankly somewhat garish visual design of Marracash couldn’t have helped. But more than that, there’s no barrier in Marracash between you and the furious interactions with others, nor a barrier between your actions and their often-punitive effects. This game is simple on the surface, but extremely demanding of players, both tactically and interpersonally.

That can be off-putting to some. Another of Dorra’s “raw” negotiation games, Intrigue, is even more extreme in this sense. I wouldn’t play it with a LOT of people, because it’s intense, cutthroat negotiations without many mechanical layers to blunt the force of that experience.

Dorra’s best games get out of their own way shortly after learning the game, at which point it’s just you, the other players, your decisions, and their occasionally horrific consequences. Which can be intimidating.

Me? I love it. But by this point in the review, that likely goes without saying.

Marracash – Conclusions

It’s not all super-streamlined, for reference. We actually used incorrect shop payouts the first time we played. There’s a bit of math involved in any session, though never too much. And there’ll also be frequent trips to the bank and between players to exchange money. A minor hassle, but nothing major.

I’d love to see this reprinted, of course, and it’s also one where I wouldn’t mind a modern-style update of the theme and setting. It could be set anywhere and work just as well.

I assume a modern update would have to come with expansions and new subspecies of components to play with. There’s at least one official expansion for the game (which is 100% unnecessary) but as long as the original could be played, sans any modern changes, do whatever you want to the theme. Hell, make it cats or anthropomorphic animals. Whatever you need to sell it to the masses, you aspiring publisher, you. Just please bring this type of gameplay back into vogue and I will be perfectly ok with any such mutations of the superficial elements.