Clans of Caledonia First Impressions

Clans of Caledonia has Cheese, Bread and Whiskey Galore!

Industrialise the countryside and trade, trade, trade!

In the 19th-century, Scotland made the transition from an agricultural to an industrialized country that heavily relied on trade and export. In the following years, food production increased significantly to feed the population growth. Linen was increasingly substituted by the cheaper cotton and raising sheep was given high importance. More and more distilleries were founded and whisky became the premium alcoholic beverage in Europe.

Clans of Caledonia Review

This is an overview of the game along with my positives and negatives.

TL:DR Players take actions making Whiskey, Cheese and other things as they spread across Scotland, buying and selling goods and meeting goals to score points.

Update August 2018

I backed this game on Kickstarter because I thought it would be a good alternative to Terra Mystica, my favourite game at the time. it’s clearly very similar but I hoped it would be different enough that they could both live on the shelf.

This had two major issues though…

One, it was just not as good as Terra Mystica. You have things on your player board you need to get onto the main board so your income increases.  That describes both games, therefore, similar 🙂 Eclipse is the same but with space fights, I don’t like that game.

TM is really tight with resources. You never have enough to do everything you want to and one of the things I like about it. In Clans of Caledonia, you seem to have so much money and so many resources. It’s just not fun.

Two, it was delivered from Kickstarter around the same time as Gaia Project was available. So now the option to play Terra Mystica was another version of Terra Mystica.

Just really bad timing. I would have still tried this had Gaia Project been announced and had the same outcome.

The problem was this made it third choice and third by a long way. This is the problem with making a game similar to games already in existence. It’s not a coincidence, the game was marketed as “Terra Mystica crossed with Agricola”.

So one play was enough to know it wasn’t going to get played again.

Jesta ThaRogue