Caylus is one of my favorite board games. In it, players take on the role of master builders erecting castle for King Philip the Fair of France. Their goal is to earn prestige by building the castle and by developing the city around the castle.
Each turn, players take turns placing workers on the board, paying them one coin each. The board has two major elements: The castle, and a long path that contains different buildings. These include a farm, which gives you a unit of food, or an architect’s office, which allows you to add a new building to the end of the path. Once a player drops out and stops placing workers, then all the workers cost 2 coins for the rest of the turn, and so on until everyone drops out.
Then you resolve the workers: Going in order along the path of buildings, the players get the benefits of the buildings they put workers on. After all the buildings are resolved, the players resolve the workers in the castle. In exchanging for discarding three resource cubes of diffent kinds (one of which must be food) to build a part of the castle, players can earn prestige points and royal favors, which give the players different benefits like money or a cheaper building. Then everyone gets two coins, and the next turn begins.
At the end of the game, whoever has the most prestige points wins.
The game is complex at first, but after a game or two you start to figure out the strategies involved. There are a lot of different ways to earn prestige points—building a building, having another player use one of your buildings, building the castle, using different specialty buildings to sell resources for prestige points, etc. That’s a big part of the game’s appeal: There isn’t just one way to win.
But while the strategies are complex, Caylus is pretty easy to learn, and everyone I’ve ever played with has enjoyed the game. It’s no wonder that this game is ranked among the top ten board games on Board Game Geek.