2007.06.03
Power Grid and Caylus
Last night I played both Power Grid and Caylus. I’ve played power grid several times before, but this was my first full game of Caylus. All in all, I enjoyed both games even though I didn’t win either of them.
As a consolation prize, I did win at Martian Coasters, which we played as a warm-up game. Of course, I can’t take much credit since Martian Coasters has a strong luck element to it.
I was doing reasonably well at Power Grid for the first half of the game, or so I thought. In retrospect I probably should have expanded my network of cities more in line with my power plants capacity, instead of racing ahead to get cheap connections. My first inkling of trouble came when I noticed that Jason H. was always powering more cities than I was, even though he sometimes had fewer cities in his network; the second inkling came when I realized that Jason was comfortably sitting on about 150 electro when I was nearly broke.
Still, I fought to position myself for the endgame as best I could, hoping to force Jason H. to run out of money before he could hit 17 cities. Had I been successful, the extra turn might have given me enough momentum to surge ahead. Unfortunately, he managed to get his 17th city (only just, though), and I was left with 16 cities in second place. He could power all 17 of them, so the game was his.
It was a pretty tight race all the way through – towards the end some of the auctions got a little intense. Power Plant 50 ended up selling for over 60 electro, and Power Plant 46 also went for upwards of 60.
After Power Grid, we got Caylus out, wound our way through the rules for Jason H. (who had never played before), and then we got down to the game. I was in the lead for a while, but somewhere in the mid-game I started to lose ground to Jason B. I had fallen quite a ways behind when I decided to switch tracks. I build the architect and started stockpiling gold so I could build a prestige building. Just in time, too. The turn I intended to build the prestige building, Jason plopped his first worker down on the castle. Uh oh. He was a bit shy of resources, but I didn’t see a way to prevent him from getting what he needed to complete the rest of the castle and thus ending the game, so I focused on my prestige building and hoped for the best.
In the end, I made an impressive surge, but came up about 4 points short.
Now that I’ve played a full game of Caylus, I really enjoy the game. There are a larger number of choices in the game than in many Eurogames, but that’s nice for a change. Also, I really don’t get all the grumbling about the game taking too long – even with one new player, we finished a 3-player game in about 90 minutes. It moved at a nice pace, with little downtime.
That was enough gaming for this weekend. Now it’s back to working on the short story.
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