Clans of Caledonia

On your turn you take a single one of eight actions — most often placing a wooden production unit (sheep, cow, field, woodcutter, miner, cheese dairy, bakery, distillery) from a column on your player mat onto an empty hex on the modular board. The physical loop is repetitive: pay coins, slide a piece off your mat (revealing income on the slot beneath), drop it on a neighbouring or shipping-reachable hex. Trading is similarly tactile — push goods cubes onto the central market and watch the price track tick down for that commodity, then the up-tick for whatever an opponent later sells.

The game runs five rounds, each with four phases. Phase 1 (Preparation) flips the round's contract tiles and scoring tile. Phase 2 (Action) is the meat: turn order is pass-order, players take one action at a time — expand, upgrade a worker column, hire a worker, trade on the market, ship via port, fulfill an import contract, or pass for a coin bonus. Phase 3 (Production) is automatic: every built unit pays out its associated good or coin, with refined goods (cheese, bread, whisky) requiring you to consume the basic resource. Phase 4 (Scoring) hands out VP per the round-tile criterion (most workers, longest network, most distilleries, etc.). End-game scoring rewards leftover money, contracts, and tech upgrades; whoever has the most VP wins.

Every action is a money-against-tempo trade. Coins are scarce, especially mid-game when income lags expansion costs, so passing early to grab a high passing-bonus is a real option vs. squeezing one more building in. Spatial choices (where to place hex-adjacent units to chain neighbour bonuses, snipe port tiles, or block opponents from the cheap hexes) sit on top of an open commodity market where every trade you make moves prices and shapes what your opponents can profitably do next. The option space at a typical mid-game turn is wide — perhaps 10-15 reasonable plays — and 'good' is hard to identify because the contract tiles on offer warp value mid-round.

Strongest skill is engine sequencing: knowing the exact build-order that converts your starting clan power into the round-3 income tier where the game is actually decided. Strong players consistently score 40+ Glory from scoring tiles by reading the round-tile schedule on turn one and reverse-engineering placements toward it. Secondary skills are commodity-market timing (selling cheese the round before everyone else needs cheese to fulfill an import contract) and adjacency-claim aggression — denying opponents the neighbour-bonus hexes they need. Math load is moderate addition, no memory load.

Build a 19th-century Scottish clan from sheep-and-fields into a whisky-export empire, watching your highland holdings spread across a modular Caledonian map.

Klemens Franz earthen agrarian palette — same illustrator as Agricola and Isle of Skye. Muted greens, browns, and heather tones; hand-drawn highland scenery on the board edges; wooden component shapes are sculpted (sheep-shaped sheep, distillery-shaped distilleries) rather than abstract cubes, which is the production splurge people remember.