Which is deeper, 2 player Caylus or Chess?

Both seem to me to have tremendous tactical and strategic depth.


Thoughts?

AHA! I remember seeing you say that you didn't think Caylus had the strategic depth PR did and I initially agreed thinking Caylus was much more tactical, what do you think now?

Between Chess and Caylus I'd have to go with Chess although it may be closer than people think.

Well, at the time I hadnt ever player 2er Caylus. I'd just play ed a bunch of games where people wasted tons of money on the provost to screw individual opponents.

I have made this comparision many times; with no luck apart from the initial neutral building placement and who goes first (first), the game is all about who makes the most of their position (and doesn't screw up).

In all honesty, I think Caylus is much deeper than chess. For one, there are (theoretically) 720 different starting positions, as opposed to just the one for chess. (True, many of these 'different' positions are similar enough to be grouped together; still, there are at least dozens of significantly distinct starting placements which can cause a drastic change to even a first move.)

Second, the game can change drastically within a couple turns. The first wood building or favor taken can lead to a number of possible responses by both players. Many chess openings are 'standard', to the point that the first dozen or so moves by each player are rote memorization. (New ideas are always coming out in chess, but the same is true of Caylus.)

The last sentence above deserves its own paragraph. Every day, it seems, 'optimal' strategy changes. One day, buildings through the carpenter and mason seems the best way to win; next day, it's all about the castle. Which track is best? Money? Points? There are many options, and all can succeed or fail.

Compare this with chess, which typically has 'open' and 'closed' games. The moves themselves will change, and often a position is a bit of each, but the number of possible strategies is still significantly less, IMHO.

One thing I think chess does have over Caylus is the possibility of a long-term tactical move. Calculations and responses can be done over a dozen moves in one's mind, and if everything thing works out, a long beautiful combination is the result. (One game stands out for such an example: Reti-Alekhine, Baden Baden 1925.) I don't think Caylus offers this kind of beauty.

The object of chess, though, is, in the end, to capture the opponent's king. Usually, this means gaining a material advantage and converting it. In Caylus, the object is to get the most points. How one goes about getting these points, with all its possibilities, is the question whose answer is why I think Caylus is deeper. (OK, you can tell by that last sentence that I'm not an English teacher.)

Before responding to your thread, what does "deeper" mean to you?

Define "deeper"??

I think I asked that same question of a girlfriend, once...


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All joking aside, I think the amount of book-learning to play standard, international tournament, orthodox Chess on it's "deepest" level is tremendous. Someone would have to do an awful lot of analysis (statistics and such) of Caylus to achieve even a small fraction of the analysis done over the last 250 years or so for Chess.

Consider "Fischer Random Chess" or "Chess960". It is a variant created by famous American Grand Master Bobby Fischer, former prodigy and world champion. The 960 refers to the number of possible randomized starting positions (an array) of major pieces in the back row for each player. The idea of so many starting combinations is to remove the book learning from the game, allowing players to apply raw mental computing power, so to speak, or to follow intuition more naturally.

Both versions of Chess can be considered "deeper" than the other, depending on one's opinion. I personally can see either as legitimately being described as "deeper" than the other.

That being said, on what level do you think Caylus is "deepest"?
On the "learning all the possible combinations" side like Orthodox Chess, or a more fluid approach of Chess960? Chess960 could perhaps be referred to as more tactical, but I'm not sure that's the correct term for the disctinction. I think it is equally strategic, just on a more pure mental muscle level, in terms of visualizing positions... whereas Orthodox Chess requires a measure of that position visualization, combined with memorizations of "right response Y to given move X", which for me, somehow seems to use a different part of my brain.

More thoughts later as a digest the implications of this thread

I think that anyone wanting to crown Caylus deeper should wait a decade or so. Caylus strategy is still up in the air is due to the release time. Given that there are noticeable (effective) styles in 2er, it appears that Caylus allows multiple strategic paths (as well as tactical tricks). Let's assume that there are long-term strategic choices (otherwise the answer is obvious). Do we really expect new tactical tricks in a year? I mean, I can classify a few ones, give them names ("Provost Squeeze"). I've written extensively on Caylus, and I could put out another 10-20 pages of useful analysis. But beyond that? Even discounting opening theory in Chess (a big subject), that leaves thousands of books on tactics, strategy, attack, defense, sacrificing, preparation, etc. Could you see 1,000 pages of useful Caylus analysis geared towards making someone an expert? How much information is necessary? Sufficient? Granted, expert depends on the population, but after 50 games of chess, you are still in a much steeper part of the learning curve than with Caylus. And that makes it deeper, in my book.

I love Caylus, but it isn't deeper.

Caylus is a fantastic game.
And it has quite a bit more to it both in terms of strategy and tactics than Puerto Rico.
But it is not comparible to chess.

If one were looking for an exacting method of determining which game is "deeper", I suppose you would have to wait until both games were solved, and then make an analysis of which solution was more difficult.

Yes, and waiting for Chess to be solved, might just have to wait until we have functional quantum computers. As for Caylus, I don't think we even know (yet) how much or how little (compared to Chess) computational power it would take to solve it.

I think we are reaching a consensus on this forum that Chess is deeper. Anyone care to argue that Caylus is deeper?

I offer a bounty of 2 GeekGold to someone who can "make me go Hmmmnnn??!!" with their arguement that Caylus is deeper.

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I'm not sure I'm ready to make an argument either way, that Chess is deeper, or that Caylus is deeper. I would like to take a moment to make some comments on things mentioned in this thread...

Yes, there are thousands of pages written over hundreds of years about Chess. However, many of those pages say pretty much the same thing. Thousands of pages could be written about Caylus as well. I spent a good decade or so playing competetive Magic, and in it's 13ish year history (actually, competetive Magic's history is probably a bit less than that) there have been probably thousands of (web) pages written about the strategy. In that case I can tell you firsthand that many of those pages aren't worth much. However I wouldn't necessarily know that without them having been written and the information compared...

The point is, measuring the amount of analysis will not give us our answer as to which is deeper. If we ran out of things to talk about right away then that would tell us that Caylus is not deeper, but that's already not the case. Without looking at hundreds of years of analysis and millions upon millions of games of Caylus played, we can't really use any of that as evidence of depth.

I think Caylus has the potential to be as deep as Chess, but it will never 'catch up' in terms of actualized depth because Chess has way too much of a head start.

with all due respect, even thinking that cayus might be deeper suggests one does not have much idea what chess is about. do you really mean to suggest that you believe you could study caylus for 5-10 years, 10 hours or more each weak, play a lot with people much better than you, and after those 10 (or even 5) years truly think there's so much left to master, and you are so far away from perfection?

how long will it take of real study, not just playing by even as few as 20 people, before first 1/3 of the game seems to be practically solved? in PR if you believe some threads here the game seems 'solved' for first 3-4 turns. how many more decisions are left before the game end there? caylus is so new i won't be much suprised if same thing happens here, once enough people get enough games.

disclaimer:
i don't play much chess, i've played 1000s of go games, i've spent 1000s more hours _studying_ go, _working_ at it, not just playing around, and i see full well how much more is still before me. i believe go is far superior to chess, but i am not ready to believe chess is so much less deep that it could be compared to caylus...