by: Michael Barnes

Caledea is a self-published game designed by a couple of guys that wanted to do a no-fat, no-filler dice rolling conquest game. The first edition, which emerged in 2008, was sent to early adopters in repurposed pizza boxes with homemade components. Recently, they’ve upped their production quality and now they’re shipping the game in something at least a little closer to a professional package. The game retains a certain homespun quality that I think is actually kind of charming, with its hand-drawn maps, cheaply produced bingo chips, dice as unit markers, and a rulebook that assures you that they are the “official” ones. Unlike a lot of other small press publishers, however, these guys know that they’re not selling a $50 game- it’s half that, and at that price it’s great value.

Its closest competitor in terms of content, depth, and genre would be the woefully out-of-print Nexus Ops although its abstraction and ruthlessness position it near Risk albeit without that game’s specific geography. This isn’t a game that goes toe-to-toe with the big conquest games like Twilight Imperium or Runewars and those looking for a baroque, flavor-text heavy implementation of executive theme will be disappointed. Caledea is simple, direct, and at the end of the day it gets right down to business without a lot of folderol. The rules (at least the “official” ones) fit on a single sheet of folded paper and can be explained to more or less anyone in about five minutes. The game can play up to four out of the box, but extra sets could expand that number indefinitely. 20 to 40 minutes gets the job done.

Each player takes a civilization card that lists how many actions they’ll get per turn, the cost of upgrading units and buildings, and a special ability such as a bombard attack or a transport move. Each of the nine civilizations has slightly different values, so a group that has only two actions per turn might have less expensive costs across the board and one that has more actions might have to pay more to do anything. The two boards are hand-drawn maps with a grid dividing them into equal squares each having two terrain types. The civilization cards indicate which combination of terrain types is their home turf, where a player can set up a new outpost to gain a gold coin and a new infantry unit.

These territories are the immediate objectives for all players because they are the only way to earn money or field new units. Money is highly abstracted and not physically spent. If you have four coins, you can "spend" them on upgrading, building, or activating special abilities. If another player seizes control of an outpost, the aggrieved player loses a coin because the enemy has salted their fields and their fallow fields are indicated by a black marker. That’s pretty awesome.

Combat is gloriously dicey. Units, represented by six-sided dice in the player’s color, can upgrade from one-die infantry up to more mobile two-dice cavalry and a three-dice general. In a battle, players pair off units and roll standard d6s with bonuses imparted to combatants for fighting on one or both of their native terrains. Defensive structures such as towers and castles also provide bonuses. It’s a simple highest die wins scheme.

There are two victory conditions. One is to simply eliminate all the other players, which happens frequently since the person who eliminates another gets extra units to compound their momentum. The other option is to complete a fortified city, meaning that the player’s capital square and all four orthogonal squares have a castle in them.