Caylus on the iPhone lost in translation

Posted by on February 6, 2012 in Reviews

Caylus is at once intricate and elegant, a nifty worker-placement game where players compete for limited resources to build a castle, develop a town, and progress through a unique scoring system. It’s challenging and rewarding. I guarantee you’ll be nonplussed your first few play-throughs. Somewhere around game three or four, it will click. And if you’re the kind of strategy game wonk who plays Caylus more than two times, it’ll probably find a place in your heart. As a boardgame, Caylus is a classic.

As an iPhone port, it’s not.

After the jump, lost in translation

Part of the beauty of Caylus as a boardgame is how much it expresses on a surprisingly small board. This is a design with enough clearly presented variability that it doesn’t need no stinkin’ dice. It’s all about player choice. In support of this idea, the layout is a masterpiece of economy, efficiency, and clear information. Nearly every single rule has some visual representation on the board. You can tell at a glance what’s happening, how long the game has to go, what needs to be done, what’s already been done, and what will happen if you do any given thing. Boardgames have interfaces every bit as important as videogame interfaces. Caylus’ is one of the best.

And it is lost entirely in the iPhone port. Rather than rework the layout to something more suitable to the iPhone, the developers at Big Daddy’s Creations have slavishly tried to recreate the actual board. You’ll often have to go back and forth between various displays to relate two pieces of information important to each other. The longer a game goes, the harder is is to track your options as the town grows past the border of the iPhone’s screen real estate. You’ll spend no small amount of time scrolling around. It’s like medieval suburban spawl and playing Caylus on the iPhone is like having to commute.

The AI provides a great challenge. As a Caylus fan, I can’t deny that it’s nice to get a game going without having to scare up a few more Caylus fans, or press into service a couple of friends to march up the learning curve. But the initial release of Caylus seems to have some lurking technical problems, which are especially painful given the length of a game. This is not a short single-session iPhone trilfe. A full game of Caylus, even against relatively spry AI opponents, can easily last an hour. So when a game encounters a fatal and reproducible crash, it’s hard to recommend it as anything other than a work in progress. Based on developer Big Daddy’s history with Neuroshima Hex for the iPhone, I have every confidence that Caylus will eventually work as intended. Here’s hoping that happens soon.

Finally, there’s the multiplayer. Part of the appeal of these iPhone ports is being able to play boardgames online, ideally asynchronously with my friends. Caylus will have none of that. This is a game only playable in real time, requiring at least three players. The best case scenario is that you and some other random dude will be parked in the lobby long enough for a third player to show up. The worst case scenario is that you’ve got a game with DOA multiplayer.

What it all comes down to is this question: Is Caylus a good candidate for porting to the iPhone? Given the length of games, given the poor multiplayer support, given that the elegance of the boardgame is lost entirely, I suspect the answer might be “no”. Which is a real shame after Big Daddy Creations so successfully ported Neuroshima Hex to the iPhone. It just goes to show that some games fare better than others when it comes to jumping platforms. Caylus suffers in the extreme.

2 stars
iOS

  • Ypy

    There seems to be an actively developed Windows freeware Caylus implementation at http://jason.long.name/software/caylus/ complete with an interface to write your own AI in Lua, although I’m not yet sure whether it’s in a playable state or not.

  • Anonymous

    I’m pretty sure you can play Async games, Tom.  I’ve got in on the iPad and I’ve got a couple of games on the go.  It’s a fairly obtuse implementation and, if I’m honest, not much fun to play that way.  I don’t think Caylus lends itself well to that kind of play, it’s just too long a game.  The major problem with the multiplayer, in my mind, is the complete lack of friend support but I’m hopeful that this will be fixed in the near future.

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, I must have totally missed that if you can play asynchronous games. How do I send invites? And without a friends list, to whom do I send them? Do I just have to wait in the lobby until players show up? Because that’s how it looked based on trying to get multiplayer games going.

    I think once saving grace for asynchronous play in Caylus is that even though it’s a long game, every move is pretty important. Unlike Ticket to Ride, where the asynchronous play is long slogs of nothing at all happening.

  • Mike Cathcart

    You have to both be online at the same time to start a game. The developers do seem to be pretty active in fixing bugs and adding features to the game so hopefully full on Gamecenter support will happen at some point. That’s probably when I’ll buy it. I really wish it had gunfights with giant dice, though.

    Also, I get the feeling Caylus is really an iPad game that was scaled down to the phone. Maybe you should use your Fancy Internet Man money to buy an iPad so you can review both versions of stuff like this.

  • Anonymous

    What’s an iPad?

    You mention that the developers are actively fixing bugs, but I don’t think I’ve seen any updates. :( As for gunfights with dice, I wish someone would make an iPhone version of Carson City.

  • Mike Cathcart

    omg I hate blog comments. Anyway, I’m basing that on comments from the Caylus forum on boardgamegeek. One of the devs has been answering questions and talking about upcoming changes. He hasn’t said anything about Gamecenter support that I’ve seen. That was just wishful thinking.

    I guess it’s possible the first update was released before you bought the game so it was already included?

  • Anonymous

    I think Mike is right that this was designed for the iPad, because it is at least passable on that platform. But so much about this game is disappointing, especially the art direction. They had the chance to do something really unique with the art, given that the game art was unremarkable and thus they could establish their own style for this port. Instead they came up with the most generic faux-realistic setting possible. I’d call it Fisher-Price Castle Playset except that at least implies a distinctive look, which this doesn’t have in any way. Too busy and too bland. Big opportunity missed.

  • Anonymous

    I don’t doubt Caylus would read better on the iPad, with more screen real estate.  It certainly isn’t the first game I’ve played like that.  But I hate when a game seems like it was designed for the iPad, with the iPhone version being a sort of “well, we might as well…” compromise.  I’d rather developers just wrote off the iPhone if they can’t make their games fit.  The Small World port, for example, doesn’t support the iPhone.

  • http://hakimbola.blogspot.com/2012/02/bermain-game-click-squares.html Hakimpintar

    this game for iphone only?