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REVIEW Calimala
Latent Feeling of Being Left Behind
Siblings will know it – that sinking feeling when you get a raw deal every time. The brother gets extra pocket money. The sister has more dessert
on her plate. If you gain an advantage yourself, that is pretty okay. But woe if the others receive a little extra and bag it with a smirk! Well, here is my warning regarding the board game Calimala: It can evoke traumatic childhood experiences.
On first glance, this may come as a surprise. After all, Blackfire Games insists that the firstling
of the Italian designer Fabio Lopiano has the theme of cloth trading in late medie- val Florence. Back then, members of the guild of fabric finishers and merchants were counted as representatives of the “higher arts.” Cloth export made them rich and they sponsored monuments and artworks in their native city.
Taking over their role, players right away have 40 wooden cubes at their dis-
with their order changing
every time, thanks to variable
tiles. Players will have a hard time find- ing a universal master plan. But, much more important are the clever trigger and placement mechanics – and this is exactly what makes those players hyperventilate who chronically lag behind.
The display on the bottom left of the city map contains more tiles: They deter- mine possible player actions. If you place one of your discs between two of these tiles, then you are allowed to use both
ingly, frequently uttered even by the most grizzled players. Of course, you make better progress when your discs get acti- vated more often. Alternatively, you can bring about this benefit yourself, by stack- ing unicolored towers made up entirely of your own discs that trigger actions two or three times in a row.
I Keeping an eye
on the scoring
Just make sure you never lose sight of
the upcoming scorings. If the city build- ings require building material early on in the game, then you can secure a lot
of points with just a few cubes. At the center of the board is the donation space, which allows you to discard stuff
from your warehouses, for the common good. But sometimes, the trade centers are scored early. Then, things are not quite so straightforward: The cities accessible overland, namely Ham- burg, Bruges and Troyes, demand that you build your warehouse there first
before you are allowed to deliver
cloth. Lisbon, Barcelona and London, on the other hand,
can only be reached by ships that you have to build at an earlier stage.
It is possible that a scoring is triggered before you can manage to deliver your goods there. With 15 scorings overall this seems acceptable, after all, you cannot
hope to partic-
ipate in all of
them anyway.
But, it still seems
weird sometimes
that the first scor-
posal and use them as
building materials for the Palazzo Vecchio or the cathedral. Alternatively, they can
produce cloth and deliver it to six other cities. Each building, each city and each type of resource is scored
once per game – with victory points for those players who have the most cubes in the right places.
Granted, Calimala is a majority game, but if you think nothing new was invented in this area since the late 90s, just stick around for a while. Then you will notice several unusual things. Firstly, 15 scorings overall are triggered during the game –
of the actions. Which implies, for exam- ple, that you can obtain wood as well as marble, or you can produce cloth as well as deliver it to the seaside towns. The trick is that all newly added discs are placed on top. Meaning, if somebody uses the same combination of actions at a later point, then all the owners of the discs underneath also gain something and are able to take that action again.
As you can probably guess, it does not take long before the clamoring sets in: “You are all playing together back there, and nobody wants to do anything with me,” goes the childish moaning, surpris-
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