Motley Is A Fool's Uniform

We have now completed our first games of the "C" games, albiet without some critical mistakes. I think I shall have to put up copies of the rules in a locked part of my website so everyone that wants to can read them, especially after totally missing tonight's importantrule...

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects is a very lightweight game – effectively a family leisure game. Of course the advantage of this is it is difficult to get anything wrong. The bad bit is that it is rather pedestrian and boring, with insufficient interaction between the players to make it "interesting."

Colosseum wasn't as nice and friendly as I first thought. At times it got rather brutal. The problem with the game is that you only have five turns to put on a spectacular, which means you have to be careful what you do, since you don't have any room to make mistakes. Looking up future events on the reference card is vital. Also the game's bidding system is totally broken. My preference is for an unlimited bidding system, similiar, but not as complicated as the intense bidding system. However this will mean the trading phase is less important (and the designers consider that to be the heart of the game), and money much more valuable. Personally I feel this will encourage people to put on good events early on, to raise the money for their final extravaganza event. And it will be easier to stage some of the extravaganzas. Not forgetting the rule where the losing player gets to ask the winning player for a specific token until halfway into the game is also a good thing. Definitely replayable with these changes.

Caylus was definitely interesting. Moving the provost to spite people invited further retribution, resulting in people expending massive amounts to avoid having anyone able to do anything. Of course, this was made a lot easier with my missing the rule about the provost rejoining the bailiff at the end of the turn. Makes it easier to recover when people (myself definitely included) go into a "and the horse you rode in on" mood. Otherwise it may look like it would probably work well. Although it may be a while before it gets replayed as several people were extremely "gruntled" by the game. Although not as much as with Arkham Horror.

Still awaiting my next parcel of games (which probably means it's time to give the Post Office a kick again – has anyone else noticed the quality of service of the contractors they use is getting worse and worse?).