New editions can be amazing!

🛡️ Calimala is a game from 2017, rated as the second best Fabio Lopiano game on BGG. Unfortunately it only used to work with 3-5 players before, which meant we never really tried it (as 2p is our most common player count). Luckily, @alleycatgames saw the need for a bit of an update for Calimala, so now there is a shiny new version with art by none other than Ian O'Toole, and an added 2p variant! 🥳

The game itself is surprisingly simple, and quite abstract. We do really enjoy it though! 😊 At a basic level you are collecting wood, bricks and marble to donate to churches, build statues or construct workshops that can make silk, then build ships and trade houses to transport that silk to different towns. 

It might not sound like much, but the way scoring works brings it all together. 👉 Every time a worker is pushed out from a stack of workers, a certain condition is scored. It’s always a majority scoring for a specific resource type, or region of the map. You really want to work on upcoming objectives, but also plan for the future. Calimala is all about timing! 🕛

To make this all into a coherent and interesting game, you have the action selection, which is again simple but brilliant. 🧐 There are 9 actions in a 3x3 grid (8 of these are randomly allocated). Workers are always placed between two adjacent actions, performing both, but additionally workers already there are also reactivated. You have some neutral contractors too that do actions twice, but cannot be reactivated. If you are the 4th worker (or the 3rd in a 2p game), the lowest worker is pushed into the scoring region, which triggers the next scoring token for everyone.

When playing with 2-players, you both get some neutral workers in a 3rd color. When using these you don't reactivate previous workers, which is essential sometimes to curb the opponent’s tempo. When doing actions where these neutral workers are present, neutral cubes are also added to the board which breaks up the zero-sumness of 2p scoring.

As I said, it all feels very abstract and tic-tac-toey, but in a good way! 🙂 It's a game of cleverly choosing actions and triggering scoring when it is advantageous for you.😉