Got together to run the first session of my new D&D campaign today. I didn't manage to get that much material written, so we were done at 4:00. Trevor had borrowed Caylus from me a few weeks back, so we decided to play that afterwards.
Ian and Carissa were playing for the first time, and I don't think any of the rest of us had played in a while. Caylus is a very unforgiving game, and I'm sure an experienced player would have crushed us.
Caylus is the progenitor of the heavy worker placement game. It started the trend which led to Uwe Rosenburg's mega-hit Agricola (well, mega-hit in the context of designer board games anyway). Players take turns placing workers to collect resources, build buildings, and work on the castle of King Philip the Fair. In subsequent turns players can use the buildings that were previously built. It's a game that has a lot of different paths to victory, and despite the game having no luck at all other than the initial turn order and the placement of the starting buildings, each game plays out very differently due to the vastness of the decision tree.
In this game, Ian managed to surprise me by ending the second scoring phase faster than I anticipated, handing me a victory point penalty for not contributing to the castle at all during that phase. I ended up changing courses mid game and pursuing a strategy that I'd never tried before - I mostly ignored the castle and focused on getting as much gold as possible. It almost worked as I missed first place by just one point. Looking back on the game, there were a bunch of things that I could have done differently to give myself a few extra points if only I'd consciously changed strategies a few turns earlier.
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