Caylus
Posted by Rob Herman at June 6th, 2007
No, I still haven’t played it.
But here is enough information to pique my interest even further into BoardGameGeek’s #4-rated title.
Samples:
- Caylus comes in a box, but it cannot be contained.
- Caylus can levitate up to three feet off the ground, but Caylus chooses not to.
- Caylus drives a van and is here to pick up your daughter.
I just played this for the first time on Saturday at a big Gaming Day where two board/card game groups met for twice the awesome.
The rules and basic strategy were pretty easy to figure out. It didn’t suffer from the “expect to lose” problem many games do for first time players (Princes of Florence hit me with that earlier).
The strategy is almost entirely about when to go for what resource/action producing square, and turn order matters a lot (but there’s an action square to move to the front at next round). Any square can only be used once per round, so you need to grab the best before other players. Our game wasn’t very cut-throat, mostly from alliances to not disable the final squares.
I really liked this game and I’ll be picking up a copy of it and Puerto Rico soon. But I also came one bad move (someone else built on the castle first and filled it up) from winning on my first time playing.
I’m glad to hear you liked it. I’ll try hard to find a copy, even though I have some trouble finding support for heavier games.
I’m OK with expecting to lose the first one if up against experienced players. If I’m expecting to embarrass myself in more than one out of hand, the game had damn well better be fantastic to make it worth the learning. (In a four-player game, of course, I don’t expect to win more than one in four anyway, but if I’m going to lose, I want to understand why.)
Well, truthfully I don’t care that much about winning or losing. But there are some games that you can feel the entire game that you’re doing great, even if you’re only actually hovering around the middle (Powergrid for me). And there are sometimes you play where you just feel like you’re losing the whole game, usually because you still don’t really know how you should be playing (Princes of Florence my first game).
The main thing that felt better for me about Caylus was with a little explanation I was able to jump into a game and hit the ground running. Our game was a little friendlier than most, but part of that was me and another player frequently allying together to prevent the third person from deactivating the final tiles.