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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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Callisto is a game that has been on my radar for a while but for all the wrong reasons. Yes, it is by Reiner Knizia, a designer who has developed many of my favorite games. Yes, it is a light abstract, a genre that I am quite fond of. However, neither of those are the reasons that I kept eyeing the game.
The reason that Callisto has been tempting me is because I’ve been seeing it deeply discounted at Borders bookstores that have been liquidating their stock before going out of business.
Chicago is down to their last one. I was in that neighborhood on other business. I had a Borders gift card that was going to soon become worthless when Borders completely went away. Short story even shorter, I went in, found that they still had a copy of Callisto and got it.
The next night, I put it on the table and found out if it had been worth the couple of books I could have gotten instead with that gift card.
Callisto is a tile-laying game where each player has the same set of tiles in their own color that are different shapes made up of squares. Think Tetris and you know what I’m talking about. Players take turns playing tiles on the board and whoever covers more of the board than anyone else wins. The board size changes depending on the number of players.
Three of a player’s pieces are columns which only take up one square on the board. They can be placed anywhere on the board except the middle. All other pieces need to share an edge with either a column or another piece of the same color.
The game ends when no one can place any more tiles. At that point, the easiest way to figure out who won is the count of the number of squares left in your unused pieces. Whoever has the fewest must have the most on the board and is the winner.
Okay, if you’ve never seen Callisto before, you’re probably scratching your head and saying “This all sounds familiar.” And you’re right. Callisto shares a whole lot of characteristics with the Blokus family of games. Now, as has been pointed out, Blokus didn’t invent this genre of tile laying games. They date back to the sixties in fact. However, Blokus has set the gold standard for them and Blokus is the game that Callisto is going to be competing against for table time.
While there are a number of differences between Callisto and the Blokus family, like the fact that you are matching edges instead of corners, the real difference is the columns. Callisto lives and dies as a distinct game by the columns.
The columns do two very important things, game wise. The first two moves you make are placing columns and, although you can’t place them in the middle, that still gives you a lot of options. Even counting mirror placements, this still adds a lot of flexibility and options to the opening game.
The other thing that this adds to Callisto is the option of playing the third column later in the game. Blocking in Callisto can be a lot more brutal in Blokus since edge to edge rather than corner to corner creates much less porous borders. Not only does your third column help you deal with that, it gives you a way of infiltrating one (or more) of your opponents’ territories.
Is that enough? I’m honestly not sure. I do think Callisto is stronger than the original Blokus. I don’t care for starting at the corners of the boards and I think that the three-player Callisto is vastly stronger. However, I really wouldn’t be comparing Callisto to the original Blokus. I would compare it to Blokus Trigon. That is the version I pull out the most often and I think that Blokus Trigon is the stronger game.
Taken on its own strengths, Callisto is a decent little game with some good replay value. I expect I will get some good play out of it and I am curious to see what my friends who like Go think of it. (They loved Blokus Trigon) Still, there are times when I have to purge my game collection and, when that time comes again, Callisto might not make the cut.
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