I’m in Jyväskylä now with Nooa, I took the boy to see his grandparents. It’s been a double vacation — Johanna gets some time off as she stayed home, while it’s been pretty lazy for me too, as Nooa has been quite beguiled by Raija and Ismo.

No visit without games, right? After we got Nooa to be last night, we cracked open Caylus Magna Carta — I had decided that was the perfect choice for the occasion. After all, it was with Raija and Ismo I first played Caylus back in Essen 2005. Back then they enjoyed the game, but found it tad too long for their purposes and didn’t buy it — so Magna Carta should be just about perfect, right?

We played twice in a row, so yes, I’d say it was a success! Ismo got the first game by the virtue of buildings castle a lot. I might’ve won, but the game ended one turn early and I didn’t get one more ten-point building. In the next game I focused on building resource-producing buildings and building the castle, which got me the game. So, the castle is certainly good, but not a sure winner, the balance between buildings and castle needs to be maintained.

I’ll have to adjust my earlier comments on the game length a bit. Our first game was 75 minutes, or 25 minutes per player, the second was 20 minutes… So, I’d say that 15 minutes per player is probably pretty swift game, 20 minutes is decent and more than that is slow — but our first game was slow, as Raija and Ismo had pretty much forgot Caylus. I can see how some people can definitely take 30 minutes per player, but then again, those people won’t probably play Caylus in 30 minutes per player, so there’s still some speed-up effect…