Tuesday 25th October - Caylus

As you can see from a previous post the Billygamers brought a fair few games back from Essen, and as Garry had snagged a copy of Caylus, which won the fairplay poll, I thought that would be a good one to choose. I had downloaded a copy of the rules from the Geek, and after a quick look sent everybody an email suggesting it might be a good idea if they could have a read before our session. The rulebook is 12 pages long and quite comprehensive. It takes a little while to figure out what the mechanisms are and what you are supposed to be doing. The ways that you can score Royal Favour for instance are scattered throughout the rulebook so it is easy to forget you’ve just earned one. The reading of the rules took well over half an hour and together with the set up we didn’t actually start playing for 45 minutes.
However once we had played for while it all started to fall into place. I’m sure that we played a few rules wrong, for instance if you played a worker in the castle but didn’t have the right cubes to build you got -2 prestige points, nope didn’t do that. The person who builds the most houses in a turn in the castle gets a Royal Favour, nope, didn't do that. Also we didn’t notice the space with the goldmine on it until after the final scoring. We had commented that it was proving difficult to get gold. Doh! Nobody got very far up any of the Royal Favour tracks, so I’m sure we’re missing something here. Not one blue building got built either, Richard had the building that allowed you to purchase prestige points and kept getting first dibs on that and scored a fair few points that way. I like the mechanism that the cost to place workers gets more expensive the more people pass. Gives you some interesting decisions. The pub was also quite a popular place, quite a few fights in there to get possession. I guess the game took us at least 150 minutes but I think this will come down next play as we all have a better idea of what is happening. Everybody will have different ideas of how to proceed, probably a lot different to this playing. As to the game components, they were good quality. Nice wooden dobbers, good quality tiles and the board is nicely illustrated.
Even though we misplayed a few rules I think we all enjoyed it. I’m sure our final scores are pretty low and the average winning score is probably a lot higher, but that will change next play I’m sure.

Final Scores
Richard 53, Steve 41, Garry 40, Colin 40