Clans of Caledonia Review
Scotland. Scotland! Home of the brave. Where the Clans of Caledonia frolick through the heather between cow shed and creamery, disturbed only by the twitters of the grouse and the anguished screams when Dougle falls over and gets a thistle up his kilt. Poor Dougle. Forever dreaming of growing a field of wheat but always 3 florins short of a crown, if you get my meaning. Because you’ll need a good head on your shoulders to navigate this particular brand of interclan rivalry.
Players: 1-4
Time: 30-120 mins
Ages: 12+
Designer: Juma Al-JouJou
Artist: Klemens Franz
Publisher: Karma Games
Scotland, you see, is about to have quite the economic revolution driven, as far as I can tell, by whiskey, cheese, and toast. Which to be fair, is all a man needs for happiness. You see, a terrible series of harvests have driven up the price of Claret (don’t you just hate it when that happens?) and so the markets of the world are looking for a new tipple, and the islands and lochs of Scotland are all too happy to provide. But fulfilling the demands of export contracts requires infrastructure and organisation and that, my bonnie laddie/lassie, is where you come in.
From your ancestral homes in… round 1, you’ll fill the hexes of Scotland with exciting new industries like sheep, cows, cheese makers and, of course, whiskey. These territory hogging wooden pieces will produce their respective goods for your clan, goods that can be sold at market for cash, or exported to fulfill contracts in the finest traditions of point scoring games the Highlands over. Scotland is, without doubt, a magical land. A mystical land. A Terra Mystica, if you will.
It is in that legendary game that you will find the seed from which Clans has grown. It has the turn structure of Terra Mystica, continually taking one action at a time until everyone has passed. 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. It has the same feel of controlling swathes of terrain, the same subtle nudge to get you to build close to your neighbour. Even a shipping stat to upgrade and end game points for separate but connected territories. One cannot visit Clans of Caledonia without seeing the shadow cast by that gaming titan.
There are, of course, differences. No bowls of power or crazy cult tracks for one. But what it lacks in magic bowls it makes up for in raw economy. Terra Mystica is a fight with your limited resources to get anything constructed on territory that isn’t even friendly to you. Clans of Caledonia provides you with an abundance of riches and the capability to build as much as you can afford. It’s incredibly freeing, and yet you never finish a round not feeling like there was something more you would have liked to get built.
That freedom primarily comes about because of only having a single resource, money, to worry about as opposed to Terra Mystica’s 3 (at minimum). All that production and the custom wooden resources are simply representations of money in another form, as all the capitalists will tell you. And Clans provides the means to buy and sell these resources on the free market.
The market board takes up almost as much table space as hexy Scotland and game wise sits somewhere between superfluous and the most important part of the game, depending entirely on how players decide to utilise it. The market is, as you might expect, a place players can go to buy and sell goods, and in so doing raise or lower the value of those goods, respectively. You need trained merchants to actually enter the market, and you only start with 2, although they are relatively inexpensive to hire. It ends up forming a release valve for when you desperately need one resource or another, a place of exciting opportunism if you can buy high and sell low… I might be using it wrong… Or a central feature of your strategy if you know what you’re doing and the other clans play ball.
The market is a great gameplay element, far better integrated and more interactive than Terra Mystica’s cults. It is also what drives players to build near one another on the board. Constructing something adjacent to another player’s industry let’s you buy whatever that produces for a heavy discount, which can be hugely useful for the more expensive cheeses, toasts and whiskeys. But you will need to have merchants available to do this, making it feel a little less like a bonus, and really more just a free action.
Clans of Caledonia does this a lot. Specialise in one of the advanced industries, that is, get all of the buildings of one type out, and you’ll get to take a new export contract from the stack. Great! But you need to not already have one, and you still need to pay this round’s fee to obtain it. It feels weirdly niggly for a rule, going against what you expect, and yet it is all entirely consistent with the normal rules for gaining export contracts. Games typically give these bonuses for free but Clans doesnt want to offer you such obvious exploits. That might leave you with a bit of a bad taste in your mouth but, well, life in the Highlands isn’t easy! And it means your successes within the system are all the more deserved.
It really is an impressive system. 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. Take the export tiles. These will be your main source of points, and just racing to complete as many as possible is a great challenge. But the subtle interaction comes in how they are scored. Each completed tile will bring in a certain number of import goods: cotton, tobacco and sugar cane, and for each pictured on the tile, you move the corresponding marker around a track. At game end, whichever is furthest around the track is worth 3 points, least far, 5 points! It is big points for correctly focussing on the rarest good, and you have very good reason to pay attention to the tiles your opponents are collecting. That works regardless of whether you have 2 players or 4.
Clans of Caledonia is an incredibly strong game! A puzzle that I’ve found thoroughly engaging despite its rather long play time. 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. There really are a lot of similarities, but the differences do make for a very different game, certainly to the degree of owning both. It just leaves Terra Mystica fans in something of an uncanny valley. I honestly find myself preferring the openness of Clans, the economic machinations, the fantastically interesting and varied player powers. Given it sits that little bit lower in price, and that tiny bit lower in difficulty, if not necessarily in complexity, Clans is probably the one newer players should get.
Rating: Single Malt
Our copy of Clans of Caledonia was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy from your local hobby store for £63.99 RRP.
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