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Selling printable Caylus castle-batch logs as downloads: the log your buyer trusts when a no-food batch is argued over

A printable Caylus log lives or dies on the one record nobody keeps: which batches each player built into each section of the castle, because a batch is three different resource cubes, one of which must be food, and each batch pays prestige at once, 5 points for the Dungeon, 4 for the Walls, and 3 for the Towers, while the scoring of each section then hands out royal favors by batch count and punishes anyone who built nothing, 2 prestige lost at the Dungeon, 3 at the Walls, and 4 at the Towers. Nobody at the table argues about the cubes they spent in the first turn; they argue about whether a batch really contained food, whether a player really built into the section being scored, and whether the gold left at the end was really worth three points a cube. The prestige track is a total with no memory. The only evidence is the log: a section-by-section record of every batch, or a single number that was written at the end and can be defended by nobody.

The batch rule is the first trap the sheet is built to catch, because three cubes are not a batch unless they are three different cubes and one of them is food. A player who spends wood, wood, and food has not built a batch, a player who spends wood, stone, and cloth with no food has not built a batch, and a player who claims the 5 Dungeon points for either has claimed points the game never awarded. The sheet therefore has one row per batch with its three cubes written out, food circled, and the section named, so that no batch can be counted without its ingredients showing. The section matters as much as the cubes, because the same batch is worth 5 in the Dungeon, 4 in the Walls, and 3 in the Towers, and the argument is always about which section the batch went into, not whether three cubes were spent.

Section scoring is the second trap, because the favors and the penalties are decided by batch counts, not by totals. At the Dungeon scoring, a player with two or more batches earns one royal favor and a player with no batch loses 2 prestige; at the Walls scoring, two batches earn one favor, three or four earn two, and five or more earn three, while a player with no batch loses 3; at the Towers scoring, two or three batches earn one favor, four or five earn two, and six or more earn three, while a player with no batch loses 4. A player who writes down "castle: 29 points" with no section breakdown has written down nothing a sceptical opponent can check, because the favor count cannot be reconstructed from the total and the penalty cannot be checked without knowing who built nothing where. The log records batches per section, the favor earned per section, and any penalty, in that order, so the castle score is a calculation anyone can repeat.

The worked tally is where the sheet earns its price, because it shows the exact arithmetic a buyer will have to defend at their own table. Player A built 3 Dungeon batches at 5 points each, 2 Walls batches at 4 each, and 2 Towers batches at 3 each, giving 15 + 8 + 6 = 29 castle points, plus endgame leftovers of 2 gold cubes at 3 points each, 9 other cubes at 1 point per 3 cubes, and 8 deniers at 1 point per 4 deniers, giving 6 + 3 + 2 = 11, for a castle-and-leftovers tally of 40. Player B built 2 Dungeon batches, 3 Walls batches, and 1 Towers batch, giving 10 + 12 + 3 = 25 castle points, plus leftovers of 3 gold cubes at 3 each, 6 other cubes at 1 per 3, and 8 deniers at 1 per 4, giving 9 + 2 + 2 = 13, for a tally of 38, so A leads by 2. The counterfactuals are printed beside the tally because they are the arguments the sheet prevents: if B counts one extra Dungeon batch made of wood, stone, and cloth with no food, B falsely adds 5 and reaches 43, flipping the result on a batch that was never legal; if A counts all 9 leftover other cubes at 1 point each instead of 1 point per 3, A falsely reaches 46 and inflates the margin; and if B counts all 8 leftover deniers at 1 point each instead of 1 point per 4, B falsely reaches 44 and flips the result on loose change. Every one of those errors is a single line the log either records or does not.

That is the product: not a rules summary, but a scoring log a seller can print, a buyer can fill in as each batch is placed, and a table can trust when the Towers are scored. The sheet lists every batch with its three cubes and its section, the favor and penalty per section, and the leftover conversion at the end, so that the final total is the sum of lines anyone can re-add.

A buyer who has lost a game to a batch that never contained food will pay for a sheet that makes the missing food visible before the scores are announced, and a seller who has watched that argument ruin a game night will buy the sheet that ends it. Sell the log, not the lesson: the buyer already knows how Caylus scores, and what they are missing is the record that proves it.

This log is a printable download for personal table use. It is not affiliated with the publisher or the designer, and it does not replace the rulebook: where the log and the rulebook disagree, the rulebook wins, and the sheet should be checked against the castle sections actually in play before the game starts.

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