The Best-Laid Clans?

I play a lot of board games. But there are those out there who play "a lot a lot," and it seems like many of those players gravitate to games with more mechanics, more complexity, more difficult decisions, and more time required to play. I recently tried a game that to me seemed designed with that audience in mind: Clans of Caledonia, from designer Juma Al-JouJou.

Released in 2017 and nominated for many awards, Clans of Caledonia has gone on to secure a Top 50 slot on Board Game Geek. Its theme is very much the stuff that "crunchy" board games are made of -- you're in charge of a 19th-century Scottish clan, managing agriculture, expanding your holdings, and making and selling commodities from cotton to cheese to (of course) whiskey.

Any one piece of this game is not too hard to wrap your brain around. But there's a rather intimidating number of elements here. The game takes place on a shared map; it's a modular board with multiple configurations, depicting multiple terrain types. You must expand your clan, which means you'll be encroaching on the other players. There are many things you can produce on land hexes, each limited to different types of land. There's also a track you must advance on to let your people expand across rivers and lochs, allowing you to save money and compete for an end-game scoring bonus.

What you produce on the tiles is a game unto itself. There are two different ways to earn money from a hex, depending on whether it contains a forest or a mountain. Then there are both raw commodities, and the processed goods you can turn them into. The former is faster but less valuable; the latter requires that you manufacture one thing and possess the means to transform it. Balancing the ways you earn money with the ways you make stuff poses a pretty classic dilemma for these kinds of games: you're balancing improvement of your infrastructure against cashing in for points to win the game.

There's a commodities exchange mechanic woven into the mix too. Different goods in the game have a price that rises and falls as people buy and sell it; focusing where the other players don't can be very profitable (yet may not be where you can earn points most easily), while competing with other players can still be profitable if you just buy (or sell) when the price is at its lowest (or highest). Then there are trade discounts; when you expand your clan on the game board into a hex that's adjacent to another player, you get a chance to buy the good that that opponent makes on that hex at a discount from the bank.

Overwhelmed yet? Well, try getting started. The very first decision you have to make in the game is which one of the game's clans you'll play, each with a unique power to cheat the rules in some way. They're great for focusing your strategy on different aspects of the system. Yet it's also quite impossible to really understand how they all work the first couple times out. Some are so complex that it's easy to give up on wanting to understand them when you're drafting clans at the start of the game. So rather than shift your focus to new areas of the game, they seem to steer you right back toward the familiar that you already understand (or at least think you do).

Whenever you take a turn in the game, there are literally 8 different actions for you to choose from. And even when you choose one of those 8 as the one you want, there are often secondary choices to be made. You want to build... but where? You want to buy commodities... but what? Figuring out what you want to do in this game can be quite a challenge. And because of that, the down time between your turns can be quite extreme. Each action a player takes can upset the next player's plans, and while it's nice to know that what you do does matter -- you're definitely interacting here -- it means that planning ahead can be quite hard to do. So almost every turn sees a player starting from square one, stepping through their massive decision matrix, and taking a long time to do so. An understandably long time, but a frustratingly long time nevertheless. The pace of play feels glacial.

Perhaps if I could just download into my brain a more advanced understanding of this game (and if I could do the same for all my opponents), I'd feel rewarded with the vast array of choices it presents. But after playing a few times, I just felt that there was simply too much more going on here than it really needed to have. Other "farming games" better scratch the itch for me than Clans of Caledonia. I give it a C+.