Marrakech
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Marrakech
Stephen: [00:00:00] All right, so on the table now is Marrakech, and you may be wondering which Marrakech are we talking about? Because there are dozens of games that have Marrakech or Marrakech or some variant of that city name as its title. This is the one with the carpets.
Samuel: Marrakech. The one with the carpets.
Stephen: The one with the carpets. I mean, that should be what it is.
Marrakech colon. The one with the carpets.
Samuel: Is it actually just marrakech?
Stephen: It's just Marrakech. Just merch.
John: Yes. With the "C" on
Chris: the end. Can you give us the flavor? Flavor? Doesn't it have like a whole one of the pages in the 17 page rule book, but it's cuz it's in 16 different languages.
Stephen: We offer free replacement of all game pieces for 10 years simply by sending us a What year was this you?
They, 2007. Ah, we, we ruin, we missed the,
John: they need to give us silver coin.
Stephen: I mean, FunDex is still around so we might be. I don't know. Gigax,
Chris: you can still buy this game.
Stephen: I don't know.
John: Gigantic
Stephen: Gigantic. Oh yeah, I'm, I'm sorry. Mississippi [00:01:00] Public Education. Strikes again.
John: Mm-hmm.
Stephen: And also I'm reading it upside down, so that's part of it.
Chris: You're also in Spanish.
Stephen: All right. So Marrakech, um, I think Chris is the one that's most familiar with this one. You wanna give us the rundown?
Chris: Sure. Um, is there any flavor text in there?
Stephen: I didn't see any flavor text in the rule book. Uh, it's really one page. It's just in a whole bunch of different languages.
Chris: Gotcha.
Stephen: So this is, that's why there's 17 pages actually. There's. 26, 27 pages. But it's all different languages.
John: All different languages. One of them Arabic. It should be. Yeah. I mean it's marrakech.
Stephen: It is Marrakech.
Chris: Anyway, so this is an area control game. Uh, it's short and sweet. It's simple. It's probably gonna take us all of 20 minutes to play.
It's very simple to understand. We each start with. Was it 30 gold and 12 carpets? And we have a boss and he's gonna be walking around if he, if he lands on a space that somebody else has a carpet on, when you roll it, then you pay that [00:02:00] person however many pieces connect together of their carpet. Um, on your turn, it's pretty simple.
You can turn 'em left, right, or keep 'em going straight.
Stephen: And there's a die that's got one, two, or. Or four spaces that he could move.
John: The little slippers maybe.
Stephen: Yeah. Little. Yeah, they're little sandals, little slippers. Thank you. So it's got, uh, a one, two twos, two threes, and a four. So, um, as he approaches the edge of the board, there's these little turnarounds that he'll make.
Yeah. So he just kind of makes this circuit around.
Samuel: Yeah. And so the, the area control aspect, if I'm remembering correctly, is when he lands on a carpet, however many tiles of that color there are, everyone has to give that player that much money. Whoever, whoever roles, they have to give that player that much money.
Yeah. Correct. And then you get to place a carpet down. Mm-hmm. , right? It's adjacent to him. Adjacent to him. That covers up other carpets.
Chris: Yes. Yeah. But you can't cover a full carpet up anymore. Cover one square.
Samuel: No, you can cover one, one of the two squares that carpet covers.
Chris: So at the end of the game, the points are scored by [00:03:00] you count the number of carpets that you can be seen from an overhead view, and then the number of coins that you have.
Stephen: Yeah. So it's really about putting your carpets in an advantageous place and making large connections of carpets so that you can more,
Samuel: it's really about bribing the boss.
Stephen: So he's Well, yeah, that too. And then steps on your carpets. Yeah. So I mean, it's a, it's a fun, simple light game. Um, we're gonna go ahead and give it a shot, and once we get done, we will come back in and let you know what we.
Samuel: Marrakesh Not, any of the versions I found on board Game Geek, but
Stephen: it's there.
Samuel: I didn't find it.
Stephen: Yep. So what we have now is a pile of rugs, you know,
Chris: big old pile of rugs.
Stephen: You know, it's, it's a very simple game. But you know, they, people talk about the presentation. and the fact that you have little cloth rugs,
Samuel: I think that's fun.
Stephen: It's really [00:04:00] cool.
Samuel: It's a unique game piece.
Stephen: It's, it's very unique.
Samuel: But we actually have a pile of cloth rugs. They're somehow still empty spaces.
Stephen: Yeah. This particular game, we still have what, 3, 4, 4 empty spaces and you know, some games you don't have any, it fills up real quick, but, um, yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Samuel: I do enjoy, you can kind of see the history there cuz there's a, there's. You know, a physical pile of rugs where people kept covering them up. So it's like four or five rugs thick.
Stephen: There's spaces with one. The space over here has. Five. This space over here has five. One has like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as well.
Samuel: Five. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun.
Chris: Two spots on the board. We're very busy. It's fun. It was a lot of large numbers, not a lot of paying other people money. Yeah, we did not really.
John: Yeah, not a lot of money kicked around on that.
Stephen: Yeah, we Got real lucky laying, uh, landing on our own spaces, so
Samuel: yeah, I, I think I had one big payout where John landed on my [00:05:00] rugs and gave me $9.
Yeah. And that's what it takes. That's what won the game for me.
Chris: Win if, if somebody had landed on me when I had that 11 there. Then I would've won. That would've been it.
Samuel: We all avoided that corner very intentionally. . Yeah. And then the
Chris: last like three turns, it was boom, boom, boom. Cover Chris up.
Stephen: Yeah, y'all covered me up the entire game. I think my biggest ever area of rugs was six. . I think that's the biggest. I was able to,
Samuel: I had, I had a
Chris: eight right there.
Stephen: I had a eight right there.
Samuel: I had a decent size area that kept getting split in half , and I was like, all right.
Chris: That was on purpose.
Stephen: That was on purpose. Yeah. I know. I enjoyed doing that many times.
Samuel: I, I figured, but I figured it's like what the thing is, people enjoyed. Putting it in half. So much. I still had a decent amount of area on the board. Mm-hmm. just, people just enjoyed splitting it. And I was like, okay, well whatever. I've still got like,
John: but that's, that's sort of the nature of the game. Yeah. So this is, this is one of those games where it's, it's just everybody's tugging on everybody else. Everybody's trying to neutralize everybody else the entire time you're playing and that's fine. It's, this is a very typical euro where the rules can be explained in 90 seconds maybe.
Stephen: Yeah. I [00:06:00] mean, the rules I think are half a page in pretty decent size font.
Samuel: Yeah. I mean, I. . When you say Euro, people kind of expect something heavier. But this is a pretty light game.
Chris: It was a very light game. Yeah.
Samuel: It's very, it's, it's fun. I enjoyed
Stephen: it. It's not like, so the, the old definition of euro was simple in that, in it's rule set, uhhuh , but complex in its play, right? So you've got like one or two rules, but the way those rules interact with the board is com gives you com complexity.
So like settlers at Catan classic Euro, it's only got like three rules. . You roll the dice, you get the resources. You pay the resources. All right, so four rules, and then you get to trade. You buy, yeah. Yeah. . It's very simple, but how you maneuver on that board and do your negotiation and all of those things, that's what makes it complex.
Yeah.
Samuel: I mean, I, I enjoyed this game cuz this, I mean, it's a simple game. I don't think it's that complex.
Stephen: No, no, not at all. I mean, yeah, it's [00:07:00] not, but given the amount of rules.
John: You, you know what this game is? We're playing a four player game and on each of your turns you have three coaches helping you out, figuring out where you should be put in your carpet.
Yeah.
Stephen: How to screw Sam the,
Chris: and we kept on heading away from each other. We would always head back to our own carpets to build.
Samuel: Well, that's, you wanna do
Chris: well, but that's what, but with the numbers, there just wasn't a lot of times where. , you landed on anybody else and you sound like times there are like you roll of won a couple times.
Samuel: You just think there should have been more money exchanging hands. Chris,
Chris: there were a couple times that it was lucky or just the right role to make it where you didn.
Samuel: Yeah, I mean that's the, that's the nature of the game.
Stephen: Yeah. I mean, I've played games where I've had no money at the end of the game.
Chris: Yeah. We've had people run out of money. Well yeah, you
Samuel: land on Chris's 11 size behemoth a couple times and you're out. This is fine. Well, yeah, but I'm trying not to call attention to that .
Stephen: Yeah, I've, I've actually played this on BGA a couple times and I think one of the times I played, like I ran outta money at le at at least halfway through some [00:08:00] guy, the guy had somehow managed to get like, , um, like a six or a seven, and I somehow landed on it three times in a row and just lost all my money.
John: Hmm.
Samuel: Nice. Yeah. So, yeah,
John: there's a big, there's a big chunk.
Stephen: Actually, that was the last time I played on bga, cuz I was like, no, I'm, I'm done with this .
Samuel: You don't even get a look at the pile of pretty fabric at the end.
Stephen: I know. I mean, Well,
Chris: my game started to unravel when you guys were running that corner,
Stephen: rug pun
John: starting on Unravel? He did a carpet jump. It is a deep, deep pile of fun ,
Samuel: and I think it ended right before our patients began to fray .
Chris: Well, you pulled the rug out from me.
I'm done. I don't have anymore.
John: No. It's just, it is one of those games where, where, where you're haggling the entire time you go, you know, you're not gonna put your carpet there. No. You wanna put it behind him right there. So you, like I said, you got three coaches the entire time you're playing. And that's, that's that e even in a game as simple as this, I mean, there's a certain camaraderie to it that you're.
Trying to knife each [00:09:00] other all simultaneously. Right?
Chris: Right. You just don't wanna give the other guy like a perfect option to like, oh, I turn right and there's nothing. Right. You always wanna make him have the chance to hit you. Right. De hit somebody else
John: struggle. It's, it's, it's four guys all with the gun pointed at each other's head saying, no, no, no, no.
Whatever you do, take him out. Don't take me out. You only got a one and four shot ahead and hitting me. And, and, and that's, that's, uh, and and there's nothing hidden here so you know what's going on. You can see everybody's money, you can see everybody's rugs.
Chris: Um, but I mean, Stephen would've had a rough turn next time.
I mean, if there was one more turn it would've been certainly,
John: I certainly wasn't getting any yellow, that's for sure.
Stephen: That's, that's a pretty nasty turn. Yeah. Um, I, I made this comment on Reddit about a different game, but I think it applies here as well. This is a game where there are just enough rules to get out of your way to let you play the game.
Right? And so basically like, yeah, there's rules and it gives you a framework, but. I mean, this is, this is,
John: comes from the decision,
Stephen: like [00:10:00] you said, this is four, three coaches telling you what you should and should not do. Mm-hmm. and every one of those voices is telling you to do something that is beneficial to them.
Right, exactly. And, and frankly, and nobody has your best interest in them. No.
Samuel: Nobody, nobody. But, but frankly, like there's just not a lot of decisions. Like there's, there's good decision points in this game, but there's not too many of them. Right? Yeah. And they're not. You choose, you choose one of three directions.
Mm-hmm. , you roll the die, you pay the money, and then you decide where you wanna put your carpet down. Yeah.
Stephen: Do you want to expand your own carpet land or do you cover up, wanna split somebody else's carpet land into two. Right. So I
John: mean there's, and the choice to often. Down to, well it's, they're probably not gonna hit me, but if they do, I'm gonna get a million dollars.
Or do I want to just make sure I keep things in their way so I get a dollar here and a dollar there?
Samuel: That, no, it's, it's fun.
Stephen: I mean, they're not high stakes decisions. It's lighthearted. But yeah, it's,
Chris: the game started off a little [00:11:00] slow. It was kind of a little boring at the beginning cuz yeah, nobody was hitting anybody.
We were spreading out. But towards the end, We had like three more carpets. It would've been, it
Samuel: would've been rough.
Stephen: It would've been nasty had the game not ended when it did. Cuz I was, I'm in a position where I'm about to have to drop a like 10 on Chris.
Samuel: Uh, no, it, it, I think Chris is about as bad as it gets.
Otherwise you've got a.
John: Four on me. One,
Samuel: you got a six from me,
Stephen: got six on Sam. I got four on John.
Samuel: But that's not right. Frankly, that's not, I'm not a chance to get to, there's, there's nothing safe, safe.
Chris: He's paying somebody
Stephen: a, the one blank space you could rule a four land, one blank space. So I mean,
Samuel: but then the person, like then John probably doesn't have a ton of good options.
Stephen: Well, he would just go this way and hurt. Well, no,
Chris: you put a tile, you put a tile
down,
Samuel: you could, yeah, you could have put a
tile down.
Stephen: Yeah. But he still. These, if he rolls a two there, he, anyway, you know, it's,
John: it's hard to put the future around.
Stephen: That's what we're talking, that's what you're talk, that's what we're talking about.
Like
John: everybody's coaching
Stephen: everyone's got, [00:12:00] everyone's got an opinion on what your turn should be, and it's never what you need. It's never what you want it to be or what's good for you. So that to me is the mark of a good game. It's fun and you've, you, you're just get in each other's face. It's, it's, it's good times.
Chris: And how long did it take us to play this game?
Stephen: 20 minutes. 20 minutes maybe.
Chris: I mean, that was set up and everything.
Stephen: Just pulling it outta the box.
John: This, this game you could play with little kids. You can, you can do a, what I was about to say, you can do a little bit of coaching, not the coaching. We're talking about , you know, you know, things like, Hey look, if you point this way, if you point that way and how you count up, and of course kids can learn from this cuz it's nice from a geometric perspective.
It teaches them and they, and they can also learn by doing their counting and stuff like that. So you, you could play this with a two or three year old and they would be able to understand what's going on and frankly be able to make some. Of an informed decision because kids can kind of understand these big sort of patches of color sort of things.
Stephen: Okay. As the, uh, father of a two year old mm-hmm. , I would disagree.
Samuel: Two feels a little bit [00:13:00] young.
Stephen: Yeah. Um, she probably, I, I wouldn't pull something like this out until she's like five. I've tried, uh, some of the haba. Some of the Haba games for her two. Mm-hmm. Plus. Mm-hmm. And she's still like,
John: that's not her thing. Well that's fair enough. She's very active.
Stephen: She still just plays with 'em, you know, she's a very active girl. It's the little fishy one with the magnet. She likes to just fish, like the game part doesn't register the activity. Part of it does. That's fair. But yeah, she, uh, yeah. Anyway,
John: and, and by the time she's old enough for this, she's gonna be old enough for Heroscape, and at that point there's no going back.
Stephen: I can't wait. Give me a reason to have Heroscape out just any reason at all. And I'm,
Samuel: you keep saying, we're gonna play it and we keep not playing it.
Stephen: Next time they leave digress. The first, the first thing they do when they leave. This time, I'm setting up a Heroscape board.
Samuel: All right. All right. We're gonna finally do that Saturday thing, right?
Play Heroscape all day. So I won. So Sam won. I knock out a win.
Stephen: [00:14:00] So it's two points. It's been a while since you've won, hasn't
Samuel: it? I don't.
Chris: It doesn't matter until it does,
Samuel: it doesn't matter. ,
Stephen: how did you feel about your win? Did you feel like you earned it?
Samuel: Oh, it was hard fought. I, I, you know, really put a lot of thought into my actions.
Mm-hmm. really crunched the numbers.
Stephen: Okay. And, uh, did, did, was there a particular strategy that you employ? Yeah.
Samuel: Yeah. I decided to go the direction where I had a bunch of my color. Mm-hmm. and nobody else's . Yeah. . Yeah. That was, that was the winning strategy,
Stephen: high strategy Marrakech, right? Yeah.
Samuel: Um, it's not like, no.
I mean, it was, it was fun. I enjoyed it. I did win, but I, you know, you roll the dot, you go however far you go. Yeah. If the dye had come up on different faces, I would've lost. Yeah.
Stephen: And I mean, nobody's gonna accuse this game of being high strategy. Yeah, it's, it's very light. It's, yeah, it's just a fun, it's it,
Samuel: and I, I enjoyed that.
I mean, like when we played [00:15:00] heat, there were definitely times where I said, I don't feel like thinking about my turn. I'm just going to play the random card this time. It's a lot easier to do that cuz you just roll the dye and see where you end up. Yeah. And then you put your carpet down. It's fun.
Stephen: All right, cool.
So let's, let's ask the question on the scale of one to 10. , how would you rate this version of Marrakech?
Samuel: I've never played any other version.
Stephen: The, the, the carpet Marrakech game.
Samuel: I gotta be all right. I gotta be honest with you. I really think the cloth carpets. Mm-hmm. elevate the experience. Mm-hmm. ,
um,
Stephen: yeah, I don't think that, I don't think this game would function if it had like cardboard.
Samuel: Right. If this were like tiles or something,
I would,
Stephen: because they would, like, once you start stacking 'em on top of it wouldn't work each other.
Samuel: It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. Um, so, . I think the carpets and they're just so unique. I think it elevates it to a seven. Okay. I think it's, it's a good seven.
It's a light game. You bring it out, you have a good time. It's like an [00:16:00] appetizer or
aif. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen: So what do you think about this die?
Samuel: I don't like the dye
Stephen: you're having problems with.
Samuel: I don't like the dye.
Stephen: You're having problems. Delineating the four from the two, right?
Samuel: It's just, it's got sandals on it and my brain wants to say, well, you've got the, like the black sandal and then the white hoop that breaks it up, and so you've got four.
So really the problem is when I look at the two, I see four black lines. Yeah. and my brain goes, that's a four.
Stephen: That's a four. Um, and then that's an eight.
Samuel: And yeah, it . So the, the die gave me some trouble, like when it was right in front of me, it was fine, but from a distance, my brain just glossed over it.
Stephen: Yeah. A little bit of, a little bit of a optical illusion. Yeah.
John: See, they needed to explain all that in the rules, because clearly this is a crisis with, well,
Stephen: hold on. Let, let's look at the rules. Maybe there's, maybe there's an erata in here that I didn't see. ? Nope. It is just, uh, 27 pages of [00:17:00] different languages.
Samuel: How many words, let me see, let me count the words while I count the words. How about
Chris: 118?
Samuel: All right. Chris is 118. How about Stephen tells us what he thought about the game,
Chris: 118 words.
Stephen: So, as I mentioned, I had a really bad experience playing it on bga not too long ago. I got my hand, my, my butt handed to me
Chris: rolled up in the carpet.
Mm-hmm. .
Stephen: Um, you know, this is fun. Uh, it's,
John: you got rolled.
Stephen: I got rolled. Thank you, . God, why can't I come up with a carpet? Pun? This is, this makes me sad.
Samuel: really felt like they walked all over you. Huh? , .
Stephen: So, you know, this, this one's fun. The tactileness of the carpets and then the, the guy that you move around and the big chunky dye and the, the wooden tokens for points for money. It is just a fun little, like Sam said, like a good game to either start the night or end the night and just kind of not have to make any. [00:18:00] hard, heavy decisions. So with all that in mind, um, I'm gonna give this one a seven. Even though for whatever reason my brain isn't working and I can't come up with a good carpet, pun , I'm gonna leave it at that.
Chris: So I always like this game. It's a, it's a fun little game. Um, I like the components, the carpets, they really make it. And uh, I know John was really pointing out like the game board, how it has this shadow on it. It's a cool look to it. The money's a little wonky. Um, yeah.
Samuel: But it's part of the charm,
Chris: I guess. So, so yeah. I'll give it a solid seven.
Stephen: Yeah. This is a, this is that era of games where everything was made out of wood.
John: Yes.
Chris: If they were to kickstart this now these would be actual,
Stephen: oh, these would be metal coins.
Chris: Metal coins that die would,
Stephen: and each of the carpets would be different from
Chris: individually each other, have tassels and
John: made out of silk.
The, the little guy would be like a foot and a half [00:19:00] tall and,
Chris: oh, you can make one in a full table size. That'd be cool. Actually. Lay down real carpet, real chunk of carpet. , supersize, marrakesh.
Stephen: All right, so let's stop that from happening. Uh, John.
Chris: Oh, I can see that coming at Gencon.
Stephen: Nope.
Chris: Why not?
Stephen: John? Let's give a number before Chris gets outta hand.
Samuel: No life size, life.
John: I, you know, it seems to be that there, there is nice game and you can play with kids, or somehow you work tequila shots and you play with the, your buddies and you just have a hell,
Chris: he just covered your sh your carpet shot.
John: Somebody lands on your carpet, you throw a shot.
Chris: He wrote a four shot,
John: two rules.
You have to have the most money at the end and you still have to be vertical. And then ,
Chris: I'll be over there laying on that.
John: Um, um, all in all, it, it's, it's just a cute little game. It's a 20 minute play. You can't take it too seriously. And, um, um, you know, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's fun. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, it's, it's not the kind of game you're gonna write all about, but it's fun
Stephen: [00:20:00] when you think about what a game sets out to do.
this game sets out to be fun. And I mean,
Samuel: I mean it,
Stephen: I think it, I think it nails it on the head.
Samuel: Yeah. I mean, we're still, we're talking about what happened. So clearly
Stephen: I think it covers,
Samuel: clearly, it managed the spaces weave.
Stephen: I finally got one
Samuel: my excellent narrative. That's okay.
Stephen: It covers the floor.
Samuel: It weaves the narrative.
John: That's all I got. We done?
Chris: Hey, all I can say is, can you see a copy of it? Make sure you shag one.
Samuel: I think Stephen,
Stephen: why am I so dumb? .
Samuel: I think Stephen might be dying a little bit.
John: Don't have carpet in Mississippi.
Chris: Everything is carpet in Mississippi.
Stephen: We do, we call it grass .
Chris: They carpet their porches.
Stephen: No, it's AstroTurf.
Chris: It's a form, man.
Samuel: All right. I think we're hanging by a thread here. We should call it.
