Cyclades

Cyclades sat on my shelf for a month before I even opened it, mostly because the box is genuinely enormous for what turns out to be a fairly tight little auction game. You could fit this and Inis in the same box, honestly, and I’ve thought about that every time I’ve had to rearrange a shelf to make room for it. Once it’s on the table though the size stops mattering, the auction mechanic is the whole show and it’s a good one, bidding for turn order, for a god’s favor, for the right to buy a monster before someone else snags it.

What clicked for me, and this took two plays, is that the auction determines almost everything downstream. You’re not just bidding for an action, you’re bidding for whether you get to act at all this round, and that turns every single bid into a real decision instead of a formality. I found myself doing the price-per-play math on this one early, a $70 box that mostly gets table time at 4 players feels like a specific kind of purchase, and I don’t regret it, but I noticed the calculation happening.

Where the game loses me a little is the endgame. More than one review out there flags the kingmaking problem once a player gets locked out of a real path to victory, and I’ve felt that exact thing, a player with nothing left to lose deciding who else wins just by where they park their fleet. It’s not constant, but it shows up often enough that I clock it every game now, watching for the moment someone stops playing to win and starts playing to decide. The creature cards get some of the same complaint, thematically fun but mechanically a little bolted on, and I’ve had games go fine without ever really engaging them.

Still a keeper for me. Scales down rougher than I’d like at two, sings at four, and the theme, actual Greek mythology instead of a reskin, earns its production. Just clear some shelf space first.