I recently played Caylus again after purchasing an old copy of the game at a con. There is one particular mechanic that I was utterly enamored with. So much so that I am writing this whole article about it. It’s a single token named the Provost.

What is the Provost?

A provost is a name for an official or supervisor of a manor or town in medieval times, though that doesn’t come up much in the game. Caylus is a worker-placement game cube pusher about building a castle. The neat part is that all of the spaces on the board, as in, the spaces where you can place your workers, are lined up so that each one comes after another. Any new spaces constructed by players is added to the end of the line. Here’s where the Provost comes in: it starts at a certain part on the line at the start of each round, and players can manipulate it moving it forward or backward. Any spaces after the provost don’t activate at all. If you put a worker somewhere past the provost or the provost moves in front of it, that worker doesn’t do anything. And the game makes you pay money to place it there!

Player Decisions

Outisde of its initial placement each round (we’ll get to that), all movement of the provost is dictated by the players. Each player gets a chance to move the provost up to three spaces, paying a dollar each. The order is hugely important here, though: the first player to pass is the first player to move it. This means that passing early is a little awkward, since it means you don’t get final say in where the provost ends. However, if you passed first, that often means you went first in the round, so it’s a bit of a nice balance for first player advantage. But we’ll get to balance later. So, if you’re going first, and you have a worker on the building the provost is on, what are you goign to do? If you do nothing, then your opponent could pay a single dollar and move it one space back. So you pay the full 3 to move it forward, and then your opponent pays… nothing. Because they couldn’t move it that far back anyway. And all of that can be affected by how much money either side has. The other important wrinkle is that there’s on action on the board that lets you move the provost absolutely last, even after the last player to pass pays. However, they need to spend a worker rather than just money. It’s costly in a whole different way. The provost gives players such an interesting layer of interaction, especially for a euro.

Balancing Buildings

Many worker placement games have ways to either upgrade spaces or often add completely new ones. When new ones are added, though, they’re often just straight up better than the old ones, either because they’re ones you started with, or because you’ve gotten access to far more resources since then. That leads to moments where your decisions feel made for you. Do you go to this starting space that gets you a white cube, or go to this new space that gives you two white cubes? This is especially true in the mid game, where there might be one or two new, strong spaces that players feel obligated to pick over older ones.

The provost throws a wrench into all that. When a new building is made, it automatically goes to the end of the line. Sometimes this even means it’s built past the provost’s starting position. So you might build a building and not even risk going to it next turn because you might not be able to move the provost that far. You can’t even just place it and pass, since passing means you get first say in moving it, not last. The provost is a clever way to include a non-static cost to higher-level effects. You can always go to an earlier spot and know you’ll be safe, but the later buildings have such allure. But it’s not like you’ll always have to pay the price, either. As soon as your opponent places their worker somewhere, you can be pretty sure they aren’t going to move the provost backwards pas their own worker. Unless they were really just being that aggressive.

Timer

The last and most minor but still impressive effect of the provost is as a timer, sort of. The actual timer of the game is the bailiff. It’s a token that walks from the start of the board to the end of the board, and when it reaches the end, the game ends, with it triggering a few things on the way. But it has a really neat interaction with the provost. The provost starts where the bailiff is each round. That means it may be far past the available spaces, or far in front of it. But because it’s risky to build past it, most players don’t. But here’s the cool part: if the provost ends a round past the bailiff, the bailiff moves an extra space forward. That means that the game ends a bit sooner. I love any game that lets you end it sooner, but using the provost specifically to do it is so clever, because the provost only gets shoved forward if players are playing aggressively, trying to get as many powerful effects as they can. So if players want to play aggressively, then the game reacts to it by cutting short their deadline. It’s just so cool!

Conclusion

If you couldn’t have guessed by now, I’m totally planning on stealing this mechanic to throw into one of my own games. It’s just so cool with how it reacts with everything, and it feels so underused. I’ve never seen a mechanic quite like it.