Caylus 1303

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 6 out of 10

   cymric

   The 'Caylus system' comes in two flavours: money rich + resource poor and money poor + resource rich. Original Caylus adopts the first flavour. Building something is difficult, and often requires multiple meticulously planned turns with associated turn order jockeying to pull off. Then there is the castle demanding to be fed resource sets like a hungry cat demands cat food and scratching you to hell and back if you don't comply in a timely fashion. Caylus does that too. Caylus Magna Carta ('CMC') and Caylus 1303 ('1303') on the other hand adopt the second flavour. Building things is easy, but your engine is limited by how much money you can spend on it. For a game of building something the second flavour evokes a much better sense of accomplishment; there is also a greater sense of freedom instead of being stuck on a muddy road to some godforsaken idiot's idea of a new loveshack. As you can tell, I am not much of a fan of the original game. In 1303 the author shifted the balance between money and resources back a little towards money, introducing a subtle timing element again because getting money back is much harder than spending it. He also made the Provost a lot more nimble at more affordable prices: in unexpanded CMC the Provost is way too expensive to be used on a regular basis, especially with the rule in place that at the end of every turn he is moved to the end of the constructed road. In 1303 there is a lot more effective blocking, giving the entire thing a much needed bite. These are all Good Things to have in a Caylus-like game. Unfortunately he also saw fit to change the castle and favour systems: there is now a fixed reward of 5 VP for contributing to the castle, and a steadily increasing amount of building actions as favours. Having a King dole out building favours seems kinda weak. That said, there are also character cards which help in a slow but steady fashion. Most important task here is to no let a player profit from them for more than a few turns. At the same time, the tit-for-tat exchanges of these cards does grow old quickly. If they are cycled in and out of your possession all the time, you are wasting favour potential after all. Overall... I'm not so fond of this new subsystem. In total you will be left with a nice and very playable game which is easily recognisable as Caylus. Whether you should go out and get it is something else, though. I found it very humorous to see that gamers are now actively embracing the ideas behind 1303 because it means they get to play 'Caylus' with more people that way. (Caylus has a bit of a tendency to be a one time-thing owing to its grating multi-turn positioning.) When CMC was released, featuring more or less the same ideas, it was scoffed at... how things change in 10+ short years. In any case, a purchase decision makes more sense if you only own the original; if you already own the card game and especially its expansion then 1303 feels somewhat superfluous. Still a perfectly fine game to play though.

2. 4 out of 10

   curtc

   Wait, wut? I knew nothing about this game (other than it's a new version of Caylus) going into it, and was shocked to learn that after 14 years, instead of getting a richer game that leverages new thinking since arguably the grand-daddy of worker placement games was released, we get a dumbed-down game. And for what? Is there really an audience of people who would be interested in worker-placement, but haven't found anything slightly simpler than Caylus in the last 14 years? I would have been more more interested if they went the other way, making the game a bit more complex by adding a new layer of something.

3. baditude

   Despite hearing nothing but positive reviews from self-avowed Caylus fans, my group seemed to hate this. I still haven't tried it yet but I kept both versions just in case