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two new games
Caylus is for three to five players, and I've now experienced it in three-, four-, and five-player variations, because not all of our players arrived at once. We only actually finished the last; we were halfway through a three-player game when the fourth showed up and we taught her the game and started over, and then we were halfway through that when the fifth showed up and we reset again. (The sixth never showed, but as he didn't respond to multiple pings after the invitation, we assumed he wouldn't.)
Caylus is a fun game. The conceit is that the players are jointly building the royal castle, while also pursuing interests that are more personally lucrative. The goal (win condition) is to amass prestige, which you do in a variety of ways: by helping with the castle, by building certain buildings in the village, by having other people use your buildings, and (sometimes) by accumulating and selling goods. (Building and castle construction also require goods.)
The mechanism is that you have several workers available, and each turn you can pay money to place them in existing buildings on the board. Each building can take only one worker and most are unique -- so there is the quarry (ok, not all buildings have roofs :-) ) that produces stone for the player whose worker is there, and the market where one player can sell goods, and the weaver that produces cloth, and the carpenter who builds a wooden building, and the mason who builds a stone building (stone buildings are better than wooden buildings), and so on and so on. There are a few special "buildings": the tourney field where one player can spend cloth and money to earn a royal favor, and a space (I forget what it nominally is) that simply pays out money, and one that lets you manipulate turn order. Finally, you can place workers on the castle.
The buildings are laid out in a track, and there is a marker on this track that indicates the last building that will be functional this turn. (It is not unusual to have built out beyond this limit by a couple spaces.) This marker represents a "provost", who can be bribed to move forward or back after everyone has placed workers. So a risk of placing workers in the last buildings is that you might not get to use them or you might have to spend bribe money to use them. But later buildings tend to be better.
Building the castle requires goods (and a worker, as previously mentioned). In each round the player who contributed the most work to the castle that round earns royal favor. If there's a tie, the first player to commit a worker gets it. (We mostly saw ties, though in the final turn of the last game I placed two workers after several other people had placed one in order to grab the favor.) There are penalties for not working on the castle in each of three game phases, so as phases come due you can look and see who's about to be in trouble (and thus probably focusing on the castle).
Royal favor can be turned into prestige, cash, goods, or access to building construction. The more you go down a particular favor path, the better it gets -- so the first time you take prestige you get one point, and the second time you get two, and then three, and so on. A score of around 40 is considered good, so if you can go all the way down the prestige track (to five points), that's 15 right there. The cost of that is that, well, you do need money and goods and buildings to be able to function in the game.
The game has some of the feel of Puerto Rico, but with communal rather than individual development. Anyone can use any bulding (the person who built it gets prestige if someone else uses it). In most turns you're trying to use several workers in combination -- placing one to get the goods that you will then use to build a building or work on the castle, for instance. Workers are resolved in order along the track, so you have to do some planning there (make sure the guy who's getting your resources isn't after the place where you'll need them). There is ample interaction with other players, both in competition for worker placements (and building constructions) and in bribing the provost.
Our (incomplete) three-player game seemed to be swimming in resources, while the five-player game was very tight, with building going more slowly or people having to outright buy resources more often. This is, presumably, by design; if everyone is able to build buildings every turn, you're adding five per turn to the track and the track just isn't that long. (And the provost tends to advance a space or two, not five.) It's a different feel, but I think the game works well for all supported numbers of players, which isn't easy.
The box says the game takes "60 to 150 minutes", which is quite a range. I didn't time our five-player game, but I think it was between two and two and a half hours, with teaching. (None of us had played before.) I think this will tend to be a good 90-minute game (or so) once we get used to it.
I played Arkham Horror despite its name. :-) (I'm not into Lovecraft or the Cthuhlu millieu. Fortunately, that doesn't matter.) The game is nominally for one (!) to eight players; we had five.
The first thing I noticed about Arkham Horror is that it had a lot of stuff -- several sets of cards, several different kinds of markers, monsters in several different groups, etc. Use a large table. The second thing I noticed is that a lot of this stuff is visually challenging; they tried to be pretty and did it at the expense of usability. But so long as there's at least one player who can see things clearly, it works out -- this isn't like, say, Twilight Imperium, where you can't see the other players' markers discreetly and you need to.
Arkham Horror is a cooperative game -- everyone wins or everyone loses. The players are living in Arkham and investigating the strange goings-on. Gates from other worlds periodically open in the city and monsters flow through; the monsters are obstacles to fight (sometimes they come to you), and if too many of them build up the city's residents flee, shopkeepers close up shop (those being shops you'd like to be able to use), and things get grim. As the terror level rises in the city, the odds increase that the big bad nasty (otherworldly being) will show up. The clear implication is that everything up to that point is chump change compared to the big nasty.
The players win if they can seal enough of the gates or, failing that, if they defeat the big nasty. (I think they also win if you end a turn with no open gates, but I'm not sure. We certainly never saw that.) Each player plays a specific character with some unique abilities. In addition, all characters have three adjustable paired abilities: speed versus stealth, fight versus will, and lore versus luck. (They tend to sum to six, so you could have fight 5/will 1, or 4/2, etc. Different characters have different bounds on these numbers.) These stats can be gradually adjusted during the game; if you know you have a big fight coming up, you can reduce your will to improve your fighting score. Objects in the game also help with this -- most notably, weapons that increase fight scores.
There are two key statistics, stamina (physical health) and sanity (mental health). This being Arkham, most things in the game cost you sanity. Getting into fights can cost you stamina. The city has a hospital and an asylum where you can get healed.
In addition to the monsters that come through the gates, there are random encounters. Different parts of the city have different kinds of encounters, and a cheat sheet tells you where your best chances are of having which kinds. Encounters can give you stuff, boost your stats, give you clues (clues are needed to seal gates); they can also rob you (money or stuff), get you into fights, and lower your sanity and stamina directly.
I'm glossing over a lot of details here. It took a while for Dani (who had played once, and read the rules) to explain the game to the rest of us. All that stuff has corresponding rules complexity.
It took us a little while to settle into the game, but I was enjoying the main part -- the quest to shut down gates. The encounters were interesting and challenging without being too deadly. The cooperative aspect added a lot, as players (who could get their characters in the same parts of the board) could freely share equipment and (in some cases) heal each other. We were able to do some tactical planning about who would do what.
The end game was disappointing. We didn't manage to seal enough gates before the big nasty showed up, and when the big nasty shows up you immediately drop everything else and have one big fight. It reminded me of Talisman, where you spend three hours doing stuff "in the world" and then one player gets to the Crown of Command and none of that matters any more and you have a tedious end-game. Arkham Horror's end-game wasn't as tedious as any Talisman game I've ever played, but it was not fun. It was just...eh. When we succeeded in killing the big nasty, I didn't feel the satisfaction of a game well played. It was one giant shrug. On the other hand, the game up to that point had been bringing a lot of satisfaction.
We paused for dinner during the game so I don't have a good sense of how long we really played, but it felt long -- definitely more than the three hours claimed on the box. But we were all first- or second-time players, and I'm guessing that the box time doesn't include the considerable set-up and clean-up time. I'll play again, in particular to see if we can win via the more-satisfying path, but if it turns out that most games devolve into that one big fight, I'll lose interest.
Neither of these games involves writing, by the way, so for those don't write on Shabbat, these games work just fine.
We had one player who was new to our group this time (one of my coworkers). I think she had fun. I hope so. :-) (We sometimes have mega-gaming days with 15 people who play whatever looks interesting that day, and sometimes try to assemble a specific number of players to play specific games. This was a case of the latter.)
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The game comes with several options for the TTSNHIPNGO, and they are of varying difficulties. We used the one that the rules recommend for first-time players; I forget who it was, but in the end game we made physical attacks and its attacks against us were based on speed. The latter, at least, got progressively more difficult -- that is, it did more damage to us over time. (Oh, and when it showed up we were all automatically cursed, but I assume that's standard.) It had 50 hit points and it took us (five players) three rounds to kill it.
One of the other Things is an auto-kill: if it shows up you lose (represented as "fight - infinity"). Azathoth, I think? (I'm not up on the Cthuhloids.)
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We were, by the way, in the process of sealing the last two gates when the Big Bad showed up. :-(