 So anyway it's a gaming day and we picked up a while ago a board game called Kailus which has been much hyped. Well a lot of people are arguing about whether it's hype or not. The point is is that a lot of there's been a lot of buzz and discussion and people saying good things about this game and you know encouraging others to play it and saying how great it is and all that stuff. Word of mouth. Well we got the game and we've played it and as you read the forums know I am mostly undefeated at it currently. I haven't exactly played it that many times. Five times. In that many different configurations. Five times. That's not very many. Yeah you're just bitter. No. But anyway the game is actually really good. It's a pretty good game yeah. It is a hard board game. I mean hard like Puerto Rico. Hard is in solid, luckless and just brains bashing against each other for an hour. Yeah if you're if you want to play a nice light board game you know it's nice and easy just about anyone can get into it have a lot of fun this is not the game. Yeah you probably want to pick up Carcassonne. Yeah or something else because Kailus is a lot of pain. Kailus is one of those rare games where when you finish a game of it you have not a headache but definitely this feeling of mental exhaustion like you have spent a part of your brain that now needs to recover. I don't feel it that bad. Maybe that's because I'm not trying so hard. Yeah anyway so the game the premise of the game is that King Philip the Fair who is a creepy looking dude by the way at least if you consider the picture on the front of the box to be a picture of him he's ugly. He is not fair. No he is not so he's building a castle in France. Oh the castle. Yes. God is very multicultural. So and you are a laborer. Oh you're not a laborer. You're like a build master guy. Yeah like an artisan or something. You're something like that. And you help to build his castle and everyone else is of course also the same thing as you. So you're competing to see who can build the most of the castle and gain the most favor from the king because the king likes you the most then it's good for you. Now it's not a victory point game. It's a prestige point game. Yeah they're victory points but they call them prestige points because you're competing for prestige of the best castle builder guy. Yeah well probably just say victory points but we might slip back and forth just we don't confuse anyone. Right. And the other part of the reason is called Kailas is because you're building this castle next to in or near the town of Kailas. Kailas is a little shit village like it's got it's got a it's a half horse town. Even though it's got six buildings in it plus you know an in and a stable and and a jousting field. It's not much. Oh those buildings the jousting field. Those are things the king built to while he sits there and waits for the castle people. Those aren't part of the town of Kailas. See this is probably the first time that's why the bridge is there. This is probably the first time you've ever paid attention to the flavor text of a game. Well I think that's it's kind of important for this game because it's not really because in other games like you could replace the flavor but in this game it's it's sort of like if you're going to put a different flavor in because the game the flavor is somewhat type tied into the game itself you need to make it match you know. Yeah the theme actually plays into it pretty well. Like if you think of the game in terms of the theme a lot of the rules make sense as opposed to some other games we played. Yeah like Tiger's New Freddy's is pretty much just yeah I'm throwing down red tiles. Yeah you could change the theme in Tigris New Freddy's to anything you want just replace red green blue and black with anything. We don't even remember what the tiles are supposed to be represented. Temples. Harvesty food farms. Yeah markets and markets and fishers. Something like that. It doesn't matter. It's red green blue and black. Anyway the point is Kailas the town of Kailas the village or should I say that's on the other side of the bridge from the castle has like six buildings in it and after that it's pretty much nothing. I mean there's a gold mine somewhere and there's a couple of the buildings but they suck. Well they don't suck but they're not really part of the town yet and what you do is while you're trying to build the castle and curry favors from the king in order to get prestige you also have to use the people of the town of Kailas to work for you. Now the basic game is simply there are a multitude of ways to gather a multitude of resources. You want to convert resources as efficiently as possible into prestige points over the course of the game. Yeah I mean you get money. You get cubes of different colors. Yep. And you get buildings. You get gold which is a special cube. Yep. What else do you get. That's really it. I mean we get favors from the king. You get favors from the king which just turned into other things. Yep. You can manipulate the provost and indirectly the bailiff. Which are just two mechanics we'll talk about. Yeah. And you can screw with other players. Kind of indirectly screw with other players depending on what you want to do. Now basically all the game is is you go around one by one taking you have a bunch of workers six right. Six workers. Yep. And you pay a gold to put a worker somewhere on a building and then the building doesn't get activated. You're just saying I'm putting a worker in that building. You basically pay the workers to go out and do work. Now they don't do the work yet. You have to pay them to go out there and then we'll see if they do work or not. Now there's a nice mechanic here where it costs you say one gold to put one out. Now at any time instead of putting a worker out you can pass and say I'm done. If you can't if you can't put a worker out you have to pass. Yeah. Now once you pass that's fine. Everyone else can still put workers out. But now it costs to and then if someone else passes up now it costs three. So what that mechanic does is it says. All right. Everyone's going to put out the same number of pretty much the same number of workers each turn. And if you want to put out more workers than the other people then you're going to have to pay up extra monies to put out more workers than the other people. And also there's an advantage to being the last guy to pass. But being the last guy to pass might mean you have to put out more workers even though you might put them on a building you don't want to use and pay extra money. So. Also there's an incentive to pass first because you get one gold. Yeah. Just Bing. If you're really one gold can be a big difference. It can it can also be nothing. But passing first gets you the one gold. You know. Since passing first really doesn't help you in any other way. So you keep going around till everyone's passed. And then you start at the castle and go down the road in order to building building building and each building that has a worker in it you then activate it and do whatever the building does until you hit the end. Then you do all the other stuff for the turn and then the turn starts over and that's the whole game. Yep. She just go down the road and it'll be like there'll be a building and someone put a worker in it. You can't have two workers in this. Well some buildings can have two workers but 90 percent of the buildings can have one worker. So if I put a worker in this building where no one else puts a worker in that building this turn. So you go down the road you get to the building that says three money on it. I have a worker there. I get three money. Yep. Go down the road some more. You see a building that says Purple Cube. Rim has a worker in that building. He gets a Purple Cube. That's really that's the main part of the game. Yep. That's that's pretty much 90 percent of the rules. Now you get all these goods and stuff and buildings. The game starts with a few buildings on the board that aren't owned by anyone. You can build more buildings and the buildings that are built are far superior to the buildings already on the board. Infinitely superior. Now when you build a building it's your building you get points for putting it out and you put your little housey on it. Now the benefits of you building a building aside from getting the points is that one no matter how many people have passed it always costs you only one money to go on one of your own buildings. See you want to kind of not put workers in your own buildings right away because that way if other people pass then you can put a worker in your own building pass later and still not pay more money. Now to if anyone else puts a worker in your building they can still use the building but you get a victory point prestige point victory point. Awesome. Yeah so if you build a nice building then other people might use it and thus give you a point. However sometimes they'll probably get more than a point from using your building. So you know then you want to use your building right away but then you lose the advantage of you know waiting until people pass to use your building and whoa. But if you have a lot of popular buildings the victory points you get from other people using it really adds up over time. Yeah if you have like two or three popular buildings you're not going to want to use all three of those in the same turn. So maybe you know you'll put one of your guys in one of them right away because it's real because you need it this turn then you'll ignore the other ones someone else will put a guy in one of them giving you a point and then after other people pass you decide you want to stick around a little while you'll put a guy in your third building you know you can get a big advantage that way. Now to mention the fact you get a lot of points just for building them. Yep. Now that's all well and good and there are a whole bunch of ways to get points there like some buildings turn cubes into victory points or money into gold and then another building turns gold into victory points and all sorts of things and you get points or building them. The primary way or at least the main way to get victory points is by actually building the castle you know the point of the game. Yeah. So the castle has like three pieces the dungeon the wall and the tower and the three these are just the three phases of the game basically. Yeah it's like in the first phase of the game you build the dungeon of the dungeons real small but if you build a piece of the dungeon you can get a lot of points for it and you can also get a lot of favors if you build more dungeon than other people or a significant portion of the dungeon and I'm not going to go into the rules on that. Yeah and the favors are cool but we'll talk about them later they're a whole separate mechanic. Yeah then the walls are the same thing except the walls are bigger than the dungeon and therefore it's easier to get a piece of the wall but you can get more favors for building a significant portion of the wall and it's the same rules just slightly different and the tower is the same thing yet again and once the tower is finished the game is over. Now the way you build in the castle is you make batches and I mean there's a whole bunch of different there's a cloth the cubes are cloth gold which is special food wood and stone. A batch for the king consists of one food and two cubes of any other color as long as they're different. Yeah so a food is stone is stone is not a batch a food is stone and a wood is a batch a food of gold and a cloth is a batch a food of wood and the cloth is a batch a stone or wouldn't a cloth is not a batch because there's never food in it. Now one of the buildings you can put a worker on is the castle. Yeah if you want to submit batches to the castle you have to put your one of your workers in the castle. Any number of people can be in the castle though everyone on the board could be in the castle. Yep you can always go to the castle if you want to no one can block you out but going in the castle before everyone else has an advantage and that if you tie for most batches whoever went in earlier wins and gets a favor. But at the same time going last is an advantage because then you know whatever else put in and you know exactly how many you need to put in to beat everyone. Yeah but the advantage of that is you just don't go in if you can't beat everyone and you wait till next turn when you have more. Yep but then it depends on if you have a whole bunch of batches and you know you can beat everyone anyway you go last beat whoever went in by one and keep the rest of your batches. Yep yep it's all you really have to think a lot in this game I thought those sorts of things. Like there's always an advantage to doing one thing but a similar advantage in the opposite end for doing the other thing. It just depends on what you have and the timing and the order in which things execute. Now there's a funny little mechanic in the batches. If you put a guy in the castle and then for whatever reason you don't put a batch in you lose victory points. Straight up. Yeah it's like you went up to the king and you said king I have brought you pieces of the castle and he goes oh really I don't see anything. And then you go I got nothing. And then the king hates you. And you can ignore the castle but once the part that they're building is scored you know when it finishes and scoring you don't get extra points you just get favors from the king. Anyone who doesn't have any batches in each section loses even more points. So if you don't build any part of the dungeon you lose some points but not that many but it still sucks. Yeah and the the losses increase. If you don't build any part of the wall now the wall is a lot bigger than a dungeon so it's hard to get shut out of the wall. I mean you'd really have to suck to build nothing in the wall at all. If you build no part of the wall you lose even more points. The tower I don't know how you couldn't possibly build the piece of the tower but if you really suck and you don't build any part of the giant giant tower you lose a shit ton of points. You just you're basically lost the game. Now aside from all that we mentioned the provost and the bailiff. The bailiff it is basically just a march of time. He moves in airingly toward the end of the board and a phase can change like the dungeon phase will change when the whole dungeon is built or when the bailiff gets past the dungeon area on the board and hits the tower or hits the wall area. Either one of those conditions triggers the scoring of the dungeon. Yep I think it's when the bailiff touches the end of the dungeon area in the beginning of the wall area but whatever. And when he touches the end part where the tower is that's the end of the game. Yeah. Yeah that's the end. And the provost is a really cool guy. He's a really cool guy. Now the provost does two things. Number one is people move him around like there's a building that you can use that allows you to bribe the provost and well it basically means you move him around for free a whole bunch. And there's the bridge. Everyone goes on the bridge when you pass. But whoever passed first pays zero one two or three money to move the provost zero one two or three spaces accordingly. Now there aren't that many spaces on the board. And if you have a game with five people that's almost that's up to 18 spaces he could move depending on how people move him. Yep. And then of course the guy who passed second can move the provost third four fifth so whoever passed whoever is the last person to pass on placing workers gets to move the provost last which is a huge advantage which means you can shut people out with him. Now you may be wondering why would I want to move the provost. What is the mechanic here. Well the first thing is that the provost is moved to a position on the board after the bailiff. Then the bailiff will march forward two spaces that turn. If he is at the provost is on the same space as the bailiff or before the bailiff the bailiff will only move forward one space that turn. That's a big deal because you can make the game move really quick. I mean if you keep moving the provost forward every turn you'll finish the dungeon in three turns which means people have three turns to get a batch in or they're screwed. So there's something big with that. Now too the board is a line which just goes a windy line. Yeah they make it windy to fit on a board. It could be it could be a straight line. It wouldn't make a difference. And it gets built in order and then things get activated in order. Anything that is beyond wherever whatever square the provost is sitting on doesn't get activated. And if you put a worker on one of those buildings well fuck you. Yeah. So let's say there's a building that gives you a wood cube and then a building that gives you a stone cube and we move and when we're putting workers out you put a worker on the stone cube building the provost gets moved all the way back to the wood cube building. The stone cube building never gets activated. Your worker is sitting on it. You paid to put the worker there. But you're never going to get that stone cube because the provost won't let the buildings behind him or in front of him depending on your point of view get activated. See now you might have been wondering earlier why would you go into the castle if you didn't have a batch. Well you might have been expecting a batch but then the provost got you. Yeah. I put my guy out to get a food cube because I got plenty of the cubes and if I can every food cube I get is pretty much a batch because I have so many other cubes. Well the provost moves before the building that gives me food cubes and I already put my guy in the castle and I'm in big trouble. Yep. So the gate there's a lot to think about in this game and a lot of ways to manipulate and scheme. I mean it looks like in a five player game there will often be semi-formal alliances where like say I go on the goal like we're near the gold gets there we get close to the gold and I put a guy on the gold. No one wants me to have gold and they're going to try to push the provost past the gold so I won't get it but I want to push it beyond the gold so I'll get it. Someone else might say hey rims trying to get the gold. I'm going to put all my workers around that area in the other buildings that are close to the guy. That way I know rim will fight to keep his gold which will protect my workers too. And then Scott will say oh those two fuckers are winning. Everyone else we got to keep the provost from getting out there. Yeah I generally assume that any building within three spaces of the provost is a dangerous area. But if someone else puts a guy way out there in the dangerous area I'll be willing to put a guy one or two spaces behind their guy where I normally wouldn't feel safe putting him. You know with the knowledge that hey that guy is also going to move the provost away. You know and of course there's a chance that he could still be shot out and I still get my building far away and we both win. Yep I usually seem to play very conservatively with the provost but I have on occasion gone balls out and gone right up to the edge. Yeah I also try to be real conservative and I only go for the edge either when I really want a building and I also get the and I also have a lot of money to move the provost a lot and I have the building that lets me move the provost a lot. You know like if there's a building at the edge that you want go to the building that lets you move the provost a lot first and if you get that building then after everyone else takes their turn you'll see okay you know if they put guys way out near the end then don't put your guy way out near the end just use that building to screw them. Yep putting a guy there early in the round makes it's a big deterrent for anyone else going near the edge until you put your guys down. Yeah until you claim a spot. And then if no one else puts their guy near the edge for you to screw them then put your guy near the edge where he'll be perfectly safe. Unless everyone gangs up on you but it all depends a lot on the number of players like yeah you get a number of players really changes this game in a in a four player game that's three whole spaces the provost can't move that he could have moved in a five player game. In addition to there's so much more contention for good buildings and favors. Yeah there aren't any more buildings in a more player game there's still the same number of buildings out there but now there's a whole lot more workers going going out. Now there's only one more mechanic in the whole game the game is actually it looks really complex and it is really complex in terms of the paths to victory but the game itself is actually very simple. Yeah the thing when I tried to figure out how to play the game I was pretty confused but then once you learn the symbols on the board and the symbols are really self explanatory but once you learn all the symbols it's sort of like learning a little picturized language once you learn them all you know exactly how to play this game perfectly. I go that building costs one food in one stone it produces blah blah blah it gives me blah victory points. It's just you have to know what the symbols mean and what they mean in different contexts. So if I see that symbol here it means this but if I see the same symbol over there it means that. Now the only other mechanic are the favors of the king the favors of the king and they're cool basically there's four tracks victory points money cubes cubes and building buildings. These four tracks you have a marker on each one and it's increasing returns the further to the right you get on these tracks the greater the reward is and every time you get a favor you pick one of those tracks advance your little marker and take any of the favors in that row that you are on or that are to the left of you. So basically the king comes to you and he says you have done a good job I favor you and you can say alright King I would like some money or I would like some victory points or I would like a cube or I would like to build a building can you help me out and you know you pick one of the four and depending on how many times the king is giving you a favor and you've picked the same thing you can do it better and better so the first time you ask for a cube he gives you a feud cube but like the sixth time he asked for a cube you get a gold cube. Yep and the victory points are just one two three four five and the money I think is three four five six seven yep and then the building buildings this is one kind of kicker in the game you can't just build buildings. Nope. You can't do any action in this game without putting a worker on a building somewhere. Yep. So there is a building that says you can build a wood type building. There is one wood type building only one that says ah this building lets you build stone type buildings. There is a building that lets you build the green type buildings the residences. And there is a building that lets you turn residences into blue buildings or prestige buildings. Those are basically those buildings don't do much but they give you a whole lot of points when you build them. Those are the big buildings the stone and the wood buildings do a whole lot of stuff the stone buildings do more than the wood buildings they're like super buildings and the green buildings don't do anything because they're all the same but they increase the income you get each turn so if you have a couple of them you get a lot of money. And they give you a place to build blue buildings which can only be built on top of other buildings you own. Green ones. Yeah. That are yours. Yeah. The green buildings also can only be built on top of buildings you already own or the pink buildings that start out in the game. Yep. A common strategy I've had is to build all the buildings that make stone and then build a residence over the pink building that makes stone thus having a monopoly on stone. Yeah. You eliminate the competition that the board presents right at the beginning. That's a good strategy. But yeah. Now the building a building favor is big because one you can now build a building without needing those those cards those buildings. Yeah. So let's say that the thing that lets people build stone buildings isn't on the board. But you get enough favors to build a stone building without that building that's usually on the board. So now you're building stone buildings and no one else can. Plus those favors also let you build them at a discount. Yeah. You don't have to actually use a stone cube to build a stone building if you use the favors. Yep. Now I mean that favor sounds really powerful but is mitigated by the fact that the first space on that track is nothing. So taking the first favor there doesn't do anything for you. Yeah. Yeah. The game is insanely well balanced with the possible exception of this one expansion building that turns gold into victory points at some sick rate. Yeah. There was this in the game is pretty much a building for everything. I mean there's a building lets you turn money into gold. There's a building that lets you turn money into cubes cubes into money. There are a lot of combos where you can take one cube and shunt it through three buildings and end up with four cubes instead. Things like that. Yeah. I like to what I do is turn a cube into a pile of money and then turn some of that money back into like two cubes. So I turn one cube into like some money and some cubes. It's a good move. Anyway. There's one building that was it's not even in the instruction book. It was given out as an expansion at Essen which is the German super gaming convention that I'd like to go to one day. They just threw it into the second printing of the game which is what I have without you know making mention of it at all. And what it does is allows you I think to turn gold into a sick number of victory points. Like the game we played at gaming for hope it was a five player game. I had run away with the game. I was a full halfway around the board from everyone else. There was nothing they could do about it until one guy who was he was pretty much at the leader of the loser pack built that building and started chunking gold into it and he almost caught up to me. Yeah. Like suddenly the game turned around completely for that one guy. Yeah. The gold cubes are sort of special in that number one they're harder to get than any of the other cubes. Yep. And two they only have a few uses number one you can use them as like where you would normally use a cube as like a batch or convert it into money but that's kind of silly because gold has special powers so using it for those purposes is kind of a waste. Unless you know you need an emergency batch. Yeah. Like I would rather sacrifice the gold than get the minus two points for not having a batch. But anyway what you primarily use gold for is number one all the blue buildings require gold the ones that you build on top of the green buildings. So those blue buildings can give you a shit ton of points when you build them. So I once recently built the biggest one it would cost like three gold and five stone and it's worth like twenty five victory points or something. It's insane but you know that's what gold is good for also at the end of the game every gold cube you have gets you three points. Yep basically the game when it ends everything you have there's a conversion directly into points. Yep like every four cubes you have that aren't gold you get a point every three money you have left at the end of the game as a point. Yep so you can use those as the. All right is there any way before this game's end game ends I can turn what I've got into victory points more efficiently than that right there because that's the final value. That's really the whole point of the game is to collect those resources and then convert them into victory points more efficiently than you would if you're holding on to them like think about when you're playing the game. I'm going about to spend three money is that going to end up getting me more than one prestige point. If no that's probably not a good way to spend the three money because if you just held on to that money till the end of the game you'd get one point. So you know it's the same thing with cubes I'm about to do something with four cubes am I going to get more than one point for that. If not it's probably a bad idea. Same thing with the gold. If you're going to turn gold into less than three points you're probably wasting the gold. Now the game is very. I mean you know I've talked a lot in various times about how some games are strategic and some games are tactical as in some games you you can plan ahead and you can have like a plan like I'm going to go for this and this and this and do this and some yeah yeah and maybe a strategic game is it's not because you could do that in any game you could always come up with a plan. The point isn't a strategic game. The plan you come up with beforehand is matters like if you go in like straight ego is a game of strategy. Your plan is how you set up your dudes. Yeah because it's all pre plan and there are very few actual tactical decisions to make in straight ego because it's usually fairly obvious what you should do for a given situation. Yeah you just look at what the board is and you see what you've got and you know which guys the other guys moved and you know where some bombs are and your move is pretty obvious. It's all about pre planning pre planning matters the most in this strategic game. Then there's a game like Tigers and Euphrates which is leans much more heavily toward tactics. Yeah you can go into Tigris and Euphrates saying I'm going to do this and this and this with a bunch of these cubes but are these tiles not cubes. Well you get cubes you get cubes but that doesn't really matter. What matters is the decisions you make on the fly in the game no matter pre planning is going to help you win. Yep because you can plan all you want but you have to really be able to take tactical advantage of a situation like oh he just fucked up and put this tile here that means I can do this. My whole strategy just changed. Yeah it's not you can't plan for that. You just kind of see how things go each and every turn and every time you take an action you have to consider the situation on the fly and make the right move. Kailus really seems to be a healthy balance of the two. Yeah it's like I mean there's zero randomness other than the initial setup of the board and the initial turn order. Yeah but that's it. Yeah that's it. The game is is so precise and there's so little lock and randomness that basically the you have the tactical considerations of everything that happens to me is caused by another player. I have to anticipate their actions and react. I think the randomness in the game isn't it's not gameplay related. What it is is to make it so the game isn't the same game every time. Yep because if the game were set up the same way every time then they'd be like I'd be in the situation where all right I go first the board's this way so I do this no matter what if I go first every time I ever play Kailus. Yep it's like battle tech the different map doesn't make the game random even though battle tech is a random game. Yeah I mean there's there's no randomness at all in Kailus. Yeah it's like Kailus there's six buildings that start out on the board but they start in a random order so how many possible starting positions is that six times six. Yeah so there's 36 it means you have 36 maps. No it's six factorial. That's right. So there's six factorial maps in quotes in Kailus. Yeah but everyone knows the map and the starting order right as the game begins so at that point you can immediately want formulate your strategy knowing exactly how the game is going to go. Yeah if you see like a certain building is really close to the bridge then that building is never going to get provosted early on which means the game is going to lean in this way which means this is what you kind of want to lean do. But on the other hand there are a lot of other players with their own strategies and they are going to try to do their thing and you have to take advantage of them and not be taken advantage of. So on any individual turn you'll see like OK he has this many cubes and he's got his worker there and he has that many money and he put his worker there. That means if I go for that then I'm going to get fucked but if I go for that then I can fuck them. Let me go for that. It's one of those rare games I can't think of many games that have a very good balance of the two. Most games really lean to one or the other. Yep. Now the only negative thing I can really say about this game is that at first glance it looked like there were going to be many different ways to achieve victory points. Yep. Many paths to victory and I still think that's true. There are. However I kind of got this feeling at first that you know the castle seems to be like the main way. It always seems to be a main way of getting points in any game like in Alhambra the main way of getting points is most of a color in the scoring round. Puerto Rico it's shipping things. Yeah. But there's also other ways to get points like in Puerto Rico you can also get points you know from doing other things like big buildings and other stuff and in Alhambra you can get points for having the longest wall. You know that there are other ways to get points that are secondary or perhaps tertiary. Well it looked to me when I first started reading the instructions of Calis that they're you know going for the castle which is the main way of getting points you know there's a way to just go through the game with not completely ignoring but largely ignoring the castle and using the other mechanisms of point getting like building buildings and getting gold and all that and coming out of way ahead. Meanwhile I heard the rules of the game and immediately thought I'm going to hammer that castle relentlessly every time I play this game as hard and as fast as I can. And it was slightly disappointing that it seems that you really can't ignore the castle all that much. You see I'll note that I really think you can mostly ignore the castle in a many player game. Yeah. See I think I was there's a line where you can't ignore the castle below the line. It's like you have to do the minimum effort in the castle which makes sense because the whole game is building the castle. I know I know you're just a gold trader. Why don't you go play gold traders of Calis because maybe I can trade so much gold that the king will go whoa you got so much gold I don't give a shit about those guys building my castle. You know what you kind of can with that one gold building. You can but you know it's not the point I'm trying to make. Yeah I think the point is it's mostly that we played the two player game a bunch of times and we played the three player game once and in the small player games you can put so much into the castle because there's so little competition that the castle is really the the primary means to get victory points. Yep I mean putting one batch in the castle even with the tower gets you at three points. Yeah. Getting a favor gets you on average three points. So you know getting a gold gets you three points but in the five player game there's a lot more competition in the castle. Huge competition in the castle. You can either go all out for the castle or hang with the castle and go all out on like gold or I think in a more player game you really can't go all out on the castle because there are just so many people trying to have to get their batches in that there's no room to get enough points in the castle. All you'll do by maxing out the castles and the game faster though you need to get the castle and points elsewhere in a more player game. Yes though in the one five player game we played I won by ignoring everything but the castle only doing the castle and trying to end the game as fast as possible so that no one could even start all their other victory point generations games. Yeah. I really don't know how see the problem is is that a lot of the games we've played are with inexperienced players. Yeah. I really want to see what'll happen if we play with like five Kalis masters or five well-learned Kalis players. Yeah. It's like with Puerto Rico when we first played Puerto Rico it was like we play with none of us knew how to play and there were obvious paths to victory and oh he's got the harbor captain blah blah blah he wins. And then as we got good at the game it got to the point where crazier and crazier strategies kept emerging and the game like that it ended up we basically discovered that in three player game the factory is pretty much the way to go to win depending on the situation but at least for now. Yeah. In three player games too. Yeah. Five player Puerto Rico is totally different but our strategy threw me off once because I was playing a perfect three player game and I forgot there were four players and meanwhile I realized that and bought a warehouse which was key. Yeah. That was it. That was a crazy game because I was I felt like I was doing great in this one game of Puerto Rico but then I forgot there was a fourth player and then my game fell apart. Yeah. I was if it would have been a three player game I would have won. Yeah. That's one thing we miss from our IT is that our art you know the front row crew the people we run with are for the very they're largely very good wrote gamers. They're very good at German games and when we get a game we all progress it largely the same rate and we I don't want we're good. What can I say we've ended up playing a lot of games with people who aren't so good lately just because of where we live and what free time we have and even like our crew you know we play the games with them and then we play the games with just us or with other people. So our skill level gets way ahead of theirs because the number of plays they have under their belt is significantly lower than the number of plays we have. Yeah. So yeah Geeks move out here and we'll play board games. Lots of board games. But I guess I really like Kailas. I think it's a great game. Yeah. Really good game. Glad I bought it. It lives up to I can see why everyone was talking about it. I don't know if it's a T and E but for the time being it's going to get more play I think. Yeah. It's a long ways out to Lodacon but we'll probably bring it and absolutely bring it. Well I don't know if I'll have time to play with any of our fans out there since we as the crew want to play this game but we can at least show you the game. Yeah. You can stand around and watch and talk to us. There'll be plenty of time for talking to you. I don't know if there'll be an hour for a Kailas game. Yeah. Though I do point out that there's the Thursday at the con. Oh that's true. But we're usually spending that in the hot tub. We could play some games in the hot tub. Not Kailas. No. Unless you want to make inflatable waterproof Kailas. That would be awesome. Hit a little little King's Castle floating in the hot tub. Throwing cubes at it. Yeah. But anyway since I've brought up Otacon don't forget that tomorrow anime day we're going to bring bringing you our actual coverage of Torakon 2006. And for anyone who doesn't listen to all the days of Geeknights yesterday we played the live show we did at Torakon. Yeah which didn't really have anything to do with anime which is why we ended up deciding to play it yesterday also because we were really tired and we didn't want to do a show yesterday. We actually little secret friend who is still listening we recorded the news yesterday twice. We recorded it. We were so tired it was crap we just re-recorded it. Yep. And for it was a little bit better. Yeah. Yeah. But I think we'll be good today. We'll be good tomorrow. Well you were good today. Yeah. Yeah. We got a lot for tomorrow. We'll figure out what we're going to do Thursday at some point. Oh great. It'll probably be ass. And that was Geeknights with Rym and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for our opening theme. Be sure to visit our website at www.frontrowcrew.com. If you like our podcast you'll love our forums. Make sure you visit them. You can send your email feedback to Geeknights at gmail.com. And if you want you can leave us a voicemail at 206 333 1537. Geeknights airs every weeknight Monday through Thursday. Geeknights is accorded with absolutely no studio and no audience. But unlike those other talk shows it's actually recorded at night.