Can Caylus become the #1 game on Boardgamegeek?
These are the discussions that certify people as boardgamegeeks.
So, speculation. Why is Puerto Rico the #1 game on BGG? Why was The Princes of Florence the #1 game before that? And why do people think Caylus is The Second Coming?
First off, Caylus has not been released in North America by Rio Grande Games. It looks like it will appear sometime in November, barring delays. The copies people have access to now came from Spiel 05 in Essen. Therefore, the pool of people with access to the game is very limited. It has 88 BGG ratings.
To challenge for #1 over the long haul (i.e., when it gets over 2,000 ratings) Caylus will have to appeal to a wide cross-section of gamers. This is the interesting quality of Puerto Rico, which has the second-most ratings in the BGG database with 4,636 (only The Settlers of Catan, currently ranked 20th, has more at 5,357). That's a huge number of ratings. From personal experience, PR can be enjoyed by everyone from casual players to those looking for a deep strategic game. Interestingly, wargamers seem to not be fond of PR since it's a system game - i.e., it filters interaction through a system and has no direct interaction. It's quite unusual for a game to be useful as both a gateway game and a serious, heavy Euro.
Another quality of PR is that it plays reasonably well throughout its player scale, 2-5 players with the alea 2P variant. This flexibility means that more groups are able to fit it into their gaming plans, and thus it sees a lot of table time. Along these lines, there is a nice scale to PR's speed. It can be played as a 20-minute 2P filler, a 45-minute 3P sprint, or as a 120-minute 5P defensive struggle.
The Princes of Florence shares many of the above characteristics. It's also playable as both a gaetway game and a deep thinker, it scales nicely from 3 to 5 players, and it can be a 60-minute 3P game or a 105-minute 5P game.
Both PR and PoF are also available online at Brettspielwelt, which helps.
Secondhand information indicates that Caylus plays a bit longer than PR or PoF, and its ability to scale from 2-5 players and its acceptability as a gateway game is still unknown. Time will tell. Fearless forecast: Caylus gets into the Top 10 briefly, then drops back down into the 15 to 30 range. Could be wrong, since I still don't understand why Power Grid is rated so highly. Oh well, that's what Geekbuddies are for.
2 comments:
I'd say Caylus is a bit too heavy and long to become number one. I think it scales well enough for two, don't know about five... I think the downtime might become a problem, so the actual range is probably 2-4.
But top-30, sure, top-20, likely.
In terms of complexity, production quality, appeal for casual gamers, et cetera, it seems to be closer in spirit to Age of Steam than to Puerto Rico (even if it's more outwardly similar to PR). AoS hasn't yet threatened the top spot on BGG, and I doubt it ever will.
The Caylus noise will surely die down once the game is out and the strategy debates get played out for all but the hardcore.
I hate to say it, but in some ways this was the bad thing about gamewire, which was that people were always more focused on games they didn't have than the ones they did, so discussion tended away from game play and more towards anticipation and speculation (neither of which are much worth reading).
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