A Capitol Idea!

During my last visit to Tab's over the January 1st weekend, we played a number of different games.

Perhaps the biggest hit was a new one for me, called Captol. Designed by Alan Moon (New England, San Marco, Ticket to Ride) and Aaron Weisblum back in 2001, I had been eyeing this game since then. It's rated in the top 200 on the 'Geek, has great looking wooden bits, colorful board, cards, an interesting (and controversial) scoring track, and a good theme (City building in ancient Rome? I'm in.).

Problem, like many designer games, this one it had a small print run (German games often only are printed in 3,000 to 5,000 unit batches). I never pulled the trigger back in 2001-2 and bought a copy (back then I only really knew about Funagain, not sure if there ever were other online game stores), and it disappeared off the radar. When I discovered sites like Fairplay, Thoughthammer and the like, they were all out of stock. Fortunately, as I mentioned in a December post, I was able to find a used copy on Funagain and I grabbed it.

The basic concept of Capitol is this: you represent a faction of a Roman noble family, intent on developing your section of Rome. You earn points by the number of developments (measured by quantity of buildings and their stature (height)), and their level of luxury (measured by public works, represented by a fountain symbol). There are four phases to the game, and each of the nine zones on the board are scored, with the majority faction scoring the bulk of points, but a small number given for second place. Each turn is played in rounds, with players playing cards to develop buildings off map, complete them by symbolically adding roofs, placing them on the board in their zone by playing a zone card with the appropriate location symbol. Once players have developed, completed and placed their buildings, the game enters and auction phase where players use remaining cards in their hands to secretly bid for various improvements.

I introduced Kim and Austen to the game on Saturday, and Kim loved it. We showed Dad and Tab how to play on Sunday, and ended up playing two games. They all loved the game so much, Dad and Tab were trying to figure out whether they could buy the rights to the things to get it republished!

The game combines many different interesting elements, and has the classic winning formula for German games:

1. It's playable in less than 90 minutes
2. It has interesting bits, and "tactile" appeal (stacking little wooden blocks, putting roofs on them, placing them on the board, seeing the board develop colorful stacks of different height buildings, watching Rome "develop")
3. Cards, area control, generous ties in scoring (if two tie, they both score the points), auctions
4. Tough, even agonizing decisions (do I play this last card, or save it for the auction? Is it of high enough value to keep? Should I draw more high point-auction cards, or more zone cards? Should I bid high in the first auction, or save my cards for the more valuable items at the end?)
5. Everyones involved constantly, little downtime

I won the first game, Tab one the second, and the score was really close (everyone was seperated by 2 points, something like 42-40-38-36), where one different play at any point in the game by anyone could have made the difference.

I love the fact that the game gives you just enough control of your own destiny to make you feel like you could have made a different play at some point and perhaps won, but not so much control that you can hyper-analyze each position for the best possible play. There is what I consider to be an almost perfect mix of tactical and strategic play in this sense.

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Interestingly, I am not sure if there is enough "meat" in this to satisfy the Northampton group, as we've been playing heavies like Puerto Rico or Power Grid, or light-weights like San Juan or Alhambra in our last couple of meetings. I don't believe we've played ANY area-control games yet (Kevin has asked about El Grande, but we've yet to take the plunge). And the four-player limit might make this more difficult, as PR plays great with this amount, and few of our group has played more than 3 times except Kevin and myself.