Last night Johanna, in celebration of her birthday, wanted to play something. Something new, that wasn’t too quick or too long — now that’s a task! I chose Caylus, as I thought she could like it. It should also be pretty quick with just two and I was keen to play it.

Well, off we went, and while she was somewhat confused by the game and all the possibilities she had, she soon figured out what to do. She wasn’t interested in building the castle, oh no — she did the bare minimum on that front. Instead she wanted to build stuff! She started right away with a mason and then proceeded to build stone buildings. Soon she wanted to build some blue buildings, and that was her goal for the rest of the game.

In the end she won the game, with a small margin. I built the castle a lot and collected many favours, but that wasn’t quite enough. I did use the cube track on the favours, which was actually pretty good — in the end, I got few gold cubes out of it. It was a fun game, and Johanna enjoyed it, too — she might want to play another game at some point. That’s always good.

I think Caylus is fine with two players. The play moves fast and is meaningful. We didn’t use the provost at all, because I knew sniping the last workers would be a good move if I wanted to annoy Johanna real bad. That’s a bit of a sensitive mechanic that can create unnecessary tension outside the game, so I think it’s only fine if both players accept it.

We also used, for the first time, the jeweler tile I got as an Essen bonus. I almost lost the tile, but found it when I was unpacking. That’s good, because it turned out to be quite useful and interesting building. It’s a stone building, where you can convert gold into points (one gold = five points, two gold = nine points). I got many points out of it.

I didn’t time the game, but I think it was around one hour, including explanations. Time just goes so fast when you’re playing Caylus…