Karma Games KAR38205 Clans of Caledonia, multi-colour

Product Information

So interactive, but in subtle ways that mean it still holds up well at low player counts, and remains a fabulous puzzle even when you are out in a corner of the map on your own. Here players can sell goods by placing their merchants here and relinquishing a number of goods equal to the number of merchants. I like games where scoring is largely obfuscated and it’s hard to know who will win till after the game is over. You need to be scoring at least 25 glory in a game to get those 180 scores that you need to beat other good players. In addition, I don't like the pacing of the game when there are huge income disparities: it's less annoying in a turn-based game, but in a real-life or online real-time game, sitting around after passing, waiting for Cunningham to finish spending all that accumulated money, is tedious.

It has the player boards that reveal your production as they are built out on to the central board, a stroke of graphical genius exemplified by Terra Mystica.You build factories that turn your milk and grain harvest into delicious cheese, bread and, of course, whiskey, all of which you will export and trade for imported sugar cane, cotton and tabacco. At the end of each round, you will produce goods and money depending on the number of units you’ve placed on the map. While each player earns money from their workers and perhaps their clan ability, it’s never enough to fully accomplish everything they might want to do. Many of these recommendations came when I was talking about my plays and enjoyment of both Gaia Project and Terra Mystica.

Indeed, aside from those one or two points where the rules aren’t as generous as I felt they could be, the only place Clans really suffers is in comparison to Terra Mystica. Also, if you deploy all 4 units of one type onto the board you are allowed to draw 3 contracts from the stack and take one into your export box if it is available paying the rounds cost. At the start of the game, there’s plenty of room for expansion, but this quickly becomes not the case as you start rubbing against the other players.I had the Clan which boosted my waterway travel and provided a few extra tradesman in the beginning. Upgrading your technology during your turn will increase the amount of income that each of these workers produces. In Clans of Caledonia, you lead a Scottish clan over the course of six rounds in an effort to cultivate and export agricultural goods. For me, though, the aspect of Clans of Caledonia that really makes the game exciting for me is the expansion aspect. The turns in this game are relatively straightforward so downtime between turns is low with the exception of if you have passed out of the round early and have to wait for others to finish.

These will be your main source of points, and just racing to complete as many as possible is a great challenge. While this intense focus on fulfilling contracts could be viewed as a negative by some, I will say that no effort has been made to conceal this from the players.

Each of the nine clans included in the game have a special ability that only they can take advantage of. All that production and the custom wooden resources are simply representations of money in another form, as all the capitalists will tell you. This does come through a little with how you place units out and what basic goods are converted to premium goods but I think the theme could be replaced for just about anything. The games replayability is solid thanks to the random board layout each game and every faction playing completely differently changing each players overall play style.