Cyclades Made Our Third Player the Kingmaker

Somebody at the after-shift table brought Cyclades in a box heavy enough that I figured it was a mistake, and then we spent twenty minutes just laying out islands and sorting five different colors of little plastic gods and monsters before anyone rolled a bid. That’s the first thing worth saying: this is not a weeknight game. The setup alone eats real time before the first coin ever hits the table. Save it for a night off.

Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc designed it, Matagot put it out in 2009, two to five players, and the box claims sixty to ninety minutes, which, near as I can tell, is a lie. Four of us ran almost three hours the first time through, mostly because nobody wanted to be the one who let somebody else buy Poseidon cheap.

The bidding is the whole game, and it’s good, tense in a way a lot of area control games aren’t, because you’re not fighting over territory directly, you’re fighting over which god you even get to use this turn. Everybody circling the same four options, watching each other’s coin piles, waiting to see who blinks. When it works it’s electric. When you’ve got somebody at the table who needs to recount their gold three times before offering, though, the AP is there, plain and simple, and it drags the whole table down with it while the rest of us sit and watch.

Three players is the version I’d steer people away from. Our third player basically became the kingmaker, throwing his bids to whichever of us he liked better that hand, and there wasn’t a thing the other two of us could do about it. Four or five spreads that pressure out enough that it stops feeling personal.

I’ll also say the game suffers from a rich-get-richer problem, plain as that: once someone gets ahead on income the gap only widens, and there’s not much the rest of the table can do to close it. Doesn’t ruin it. But it’s there every time, and it’s the reason this stays a special-occasion game for us instead of a regular.