I visited the Finnish Board Game Championships yesterday. It was a smallish event, just seven four-player teams participating. However, the whole thing was put together quite quickly and with no previous experience, so no wonder it wasn’t larger.
I wasn’t playing, just went to present my book and take a look. I did visit Lautapelit.fi to get a review copy of Caylus Magna Carta, though, and ended up playing a game with Stefu to try it out. I like it, it was a good thing I sold my copy of Caylus, as it’s now quite obsolete.
Magna Carta offers most of what Caylus does — it’s missing the royal favours, mostly, and some other stuff — and is a lot quicker. I didn’t like the favours too much anyway, I found the building track simply too strong to ignore and thus detrimental to the variety of the game. Magna Carta, in the other hand, offers a lot more variety with the cards. It’s really well done. The only problem is that it only plays with up to four players, but I believe that’s solvable with an extra set of cards and some extra castle tokens, if need be. I rarely play with five anyway.
We had a good game, though Stefu beat me hands down. More resources, that’s the way to win.