Tuesday 1st November - Caylus

Caylus-Extra-WEB
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Only three of us tonight as Richard has an early start tomorrow to go to Birmingham. Garry decided that we would give Caylus another go and try to get the rules right this time. We just a quick run through of the bits we misplayed last week and we were off. The game definitely played a lot smoother with the correct rules. The castle took on more significance and the favours tracks were used more as a result. As the game progressed you could see that we were all pursuing different strategies. I used the castle quite a bit to get points and favours, Steve built the bank where you could buy gold blocks and was getting on it and the gold mine whenever possible. The provost was travelling down the track fairly quickly nobody was paying to move him but using the free space to move him quite a bit. Garry got in the Inn early and stayed there quite a long time, the stables were used several times, notably by me on the last turn to go first and be able to build the Cathedral.
Steve had been amassing gold cubes regularly and had enough to build the Monument on the penultimate turn and still had 7 or 8 left I think. I was lucky to get to first in the turn order for the last turn because I think Steve had emough cubes to build another prestige building and that may have got him the win. Meanwhile Garry had been collecting gold and grey cubes getting ready to build a prestige building but never got the chance, but he had enough cubes to put 3 batches in the Castle on the last turn and had four gold cubes as well. That gave him an extra 21 points on the last turn which was enough to give him the win by 6 points.
As I said before the game played a lot better now we had the rules nailed. Steve made the comment that there was not a lot of incentive to screw up your opponents because you give up an opportunity to better your own position which could be critical. I was quite surprised also that as there was only three players the game took about 150 minutes. On the geek someone mentioned about 40 minutes per player so we were way over that.

Final Scores
Garry 78, Colin 72, Steve 70