Caylus online

Played first game of Caylus online, using Brettspielwelt (BSW). Impressions?

Like PR, Settlers, Carcassone, and other online incarnations of famous boardgames, there are a few benefits to playing with the computer. Low setup time (effectively zero except for match-making), no bumped tables disrupting the pieces, quick and accurate scoring, and limited table talk are the main ones I can think of.

Another huge benefit, of course is time. Generally online games cut the play time down by 2/3rds or so, based on my experience. I can play a 3-player game of Settlers in about 20 minutes, when it's typically an hour face-to-face (ftf) unless you are really hurrying.

Since my first game of Caylus took about 2.5 hours, and we expect that to come down to about 1/2 hour per player, my online expectations were for about 45 minutes for a 4-player game.

Well, I lost my first game online (pretty handily too), and it took just over 60 minutes to play a 3-player game. Wow. This means there is only a reduction of about 1/3rd off of play time online, making Caylus perhaps one of the longest boardgames online (I have not played Power Grid online, but suspect it is also just as long).

On Friday (what you would expect to be a big BSW night) I was looking to join a Caylus game, and one did not start in the hour I was waiting (alt-tabbing to Firefox every couple of minutes). With such a LONNNNG play-time, you could get in 3-games of Settlers, 1.5 games of PR, 20 games of Lost Cities, etc.

My concern about Caylus then, continues to be time.

Some things I enjoyed about my game online, and new discoveries?

There are several strategies that were employed that were fascinating to watch. The winning player owned almost all of the grey buildings, for example. He purchased half of them (it seemed) with favors which he had received from clever hosting of tournaments, and timely castle builds for favors as well. He generated so many victory points from this, along with his 1 cube of "rent" from the 2-blue+1-pink and 2-grey+1blue buildings, that his lead was insurmountable. He also demolished money generating buildings, to prevent us from easy picks.