Carcassonne tournament in Barcelona - 12/12/2015

[jungleboy]

Some of you may remember that at this time last year I stumbled across a Carcassonne tournament completely by accident while spending a long weekend in Barcelona. Well, the tournament is on again this year as part of the 4th Games Festival, which will take place over two days next weekend (12-13 Dec) at Fabra i Coats in Barcelona.

As it happens, this weekend is also the ISU Grand Prix Final of figure skating, being held in Barcelona for the second year in a row. My wife is a big figure skating fan, which is why we were in Barcelona last year to begin with, and why we are going back again this year.

So on Saturday morning I'll be participating again in the Carcassonne tournament, which is organised by the Spanish/Portuguese publisher Devir. Last year it was base game only, 4-player games, and I imagine it will be the same again this year. If anyone has any tips, or if we might be able to organise a practice game during the week, that would be much appreciated!

Finally, if there are any Barcelona-based forum members who are interesting in participating, it'd be nice to meet up. The details for registering with Devir are on the festival website.

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2220.0

[kettlefish]

jungleboy,
I wish you good luck in Spain.
And have fun in that tournament.

[danisthirty]

Good luck jungleboy, I'm sure you'll do well!

I don't know how helpful they'll be as most of them are kind of obvious, but I posted a list of Tips for a 4-player Basic Game a while ago.

Also, since you're an iOS user, I would recommend playing against 3 AI opponents at once (doesn't really matter which but I tend to practice against the Witch, the Warlock and the other guy who Jere used to have as his profile pic). A couple of dozen games against them should help to stand you in good stead!

I'll be around most evenings for some practice against human opposition too, hopefully there will be enough of us for a 4 player game.

[gantry]

All the best, sounds like a great time in a beautiful city nonetheless!

[Halfling]

Good luck in Barcelona.  I'll see if I can be online this week.

[MrNumbers]

Good luck in tournament! It's great to take part in Carcassonne tournaments "on table".

[Decar]

Good Luck jungleboy (and any other CarcC members who attend)!

[quevy]

Good luck partner!

[jungleboy]

Thanks for the wishes everyone!

I don't know how helpful they'll be as most of them are kind of obvious, but I posted a list of Tips for a 4-player Basic Game a while ago.

They're still helpful, thanks for the reminder (and for doing it in the first place). I just re-read them and posted something in the thread. Did your experience at this year's UK championships change your view on any of these points, or did you learn anything new?

Also, since you're an iOS user, I would recommend playing against 3 AI opponents at once (doesn't really matter which but I tend to practice against the Witch, the Warlock and the other guy who Jere used to have as his profile pic). A couple of dozen games against them should help to stand you in good stead!

I've been doing that, but I still find it somewhat of a crapshoot. If I play a 4-player game using I&C and T&B against those opponents, I win almost every time. But with the base game, I probably win only about a third to half the games. Sometimes you just don't get the tiles, right? I also think it's down to my own approach in certain cases, related to something you pointed out in the linked thread above. It's still natural for me to want to start and build my own features, which works for me in most games. But for a 4-player base game, I need to get more into sharing and think about the game from a different perspective.

I'll be around most evenings for some practice against human opposition too, hopefully there will be enough of us for a 4 player game.

Cool, thanks. We're leaving on Thursday evening so that only leaves three more nights at home. I'll try to set something up in the organise a game thread.

[danisthirty]

2) "The early farmer wins the field"

[Removed five pages of Dan's thesis]

This tip can be summarised in two words: "farm early".

To this one I'd like to add that farming early might be a good idea but that farming often might not be. It depends on each individual game, of course, but in a 4-player game there are often many incomplete cities and in the AI games I play, sometimes the biggest farm is only worth 12 or even 9 points.

A 9 or 12 point farm in a 4-player game is not to be sniffed at! Especially if nobody else has a share in it. More often than not somebody else will, but if it’s somebody who is otherwise behind you, the extra points for them don’t matter so much as you’ll still finish ahead of them.

I don't know how helpful they'll be as most of them are kind of obvious, but I posted a list of Tips for a 4-player Basic Game a while ago.

They're still helpful, thanks for the reminder (and for doing it in the first place). I just re-read them and posted something in the thread. Did your experience at this year's UK championships change your view on any of these points, or did you learn anything new?

My experience at the UK champs this year was that I always seemed to be too late to the farmer party. Obviously you need to be cautious as you don’t want to run out of meeples, but others would place them whenever a good opportunity came along and then spend the rest of the game growing their farms to maximise their potential value (as you described on the other thread). Don’t forget that you have half as many opportunities to place a meeple in a 4-player game as you do in a head to head, so you don’t need to be as careful with them and sometimes often it’s worth taking a risk with an early farmer (before somebody else does).

Much of the rest of it is down to luck really, but I would also suggest that it’s worth getting in on the action quickly if a big city begins to develop, even if it doesn’t seem likely that it will be completed. If you get too stuck into playing your own game and completing your own features while your opponents are all collaborating on something bigger, you’ll find it very difficult staying ahead of them all as it’ll have three people working to complete it!

Also, since you're an iOS user, I would recommend playing against 3 AI opponents at once (doesn't really matter which but I tend to practice against the Witch, the Warlock and the other guy who Jere used to have as his profile pic). A couple of dozen games against them should help to stand you in good stead!

I've been doing that, but I still find it somewhat of a crapshoot. If I play a 4-player game using I&C and T&B against those opponents, I win almost every time. But with the base game, I probably win only about a third to half the games. Sometimes you just don't get the tiles, right? I also think it's down to my own approach in certain cases, related to something you pointed out in the linked thread above. It's still natural for me to want to start and build my own features, which works for me in most games. But for a 4-player base game, I need to get more into sharing and think about the game from a different perspective.

You’re right, it really is a crapshoot. You simply don’t have enough influence over the game in order to swing things in your favour 100% of the time (hence why I don’t really like it and don’t think it should be used as a basis for a competition). This said though, when I started playing 4-player iOS I noticed that one of the players always seemed to do well so I tried to adjust my style to match his. I think it was the Count? You may find that you do better if you experiment in the same way and are able to shift your emphasis a little way towards collaborating with others (especially weaker players) rather than trying to compete directly against everyone at once...

I'll be around most evenings for some practice against human opposition too, hopefully there will be enough of us for a 4 player game.

Cool, thanks. We're leaving on Thursday evening so that only leaves three more nights at home. I'll try to set something up in the organise a game thread.

Looking forward to coming last in every game and having all of my advice above disregarded as the demented ramblings of an idiot...

[jungleboy]

A 9 or 12 point farm in a 4-player game is not to be sniffed at!

Of course, but if you committed three meeples to it early in the game, then the return on investment is not enough. So I think you have to be careful not to get into farm wars because it probably won't be worth it.

[jungleboy]

The short report is that I won 2 of my 3 games but somehow failed to qualify for the quarterfinals on a points count back. The long report will come later.

[jungleboy]

The first surprise of the day was that because there were exactly 30 participants, the organisers decided to have 10 tables of 3-player games, rather than 4-player games. This was great because a 3-player game is a much better test of skill, even though I had been planning for 4-player games all week! Although, as I was to discover later, eliminating the fourth player meant that your results needed to be much better to qualify for the quarterfinals. Last year, with 4-player games, the qualification cut-off was 9.5 if I remember correctly (with scores of 5-3-2-1 for 1st-2nd-3rd-4th). This year with scores of 5-3-2, 12 points out of a maximum of 15 wasn’t even enough to guarantee qualification.

The first game was my downfall, and it’s frustrating because I don’t think I was outplayed even though I came last. I was one RRFF (and later RRRF) tile away from drawing the main field for 21 points, and I was one CCXX tile from winning a 30-point city outright (eventually I had to settle for 13 points for having the majority in an incomplete city). These were not rare tiles but I just didn’t draw them. If I had managed one of these things, I would have come second, and if I had managed both of them, I would have won the game.



The second game was the most enjoyable one, because anyone could have won for much of the game but in the end it was down to green (me) and red. I shared the two largest cities - one with green and one with red - and won the largest farm in the last few tiles, but even then I thought I was going to lose to red. Eventually I won by just four points, 113-109, with yellow further back.



The third game was very low scoring but I had control of it for most of the game and the low scoring nature suited me (although it later came back to haunt me). Playing as yellow, I made a critical decision at one point to prevent the large city from being completed. I guaranteed myself the majority in the big part of the city, which was worth 20 points even without completion. I already led on the scoreboard and now had these 20 points to look forward to in end-game scoring which was comfortably the largest-scoring feature of the game. There weren’t many completed cities on the board so farming wasn’t very important in this game, although I finished some small cities towards the end (taking advantage of some nice tile draws) and also placed some farmers. I forget my final score but it was in the 70s, with second place at 54.



So with 12 points (2-5-5) from 3 matches, I thought I was safely through to the next round (and even texted junglegirl to tell her that). But it turned out that there were 12 players with 12+ points, including one with the maximum of 15 (the 2014 Spanish national champion Carolina). Of the 12, six players had exactly 12 points. The tiebreaker between those with 12 points was total points scored in the three matches, and I had only the fourth-highest out of the six, meaning I came 10th out of 30 and missed the quarterfinals. As we discussed here plenty of times when we were first creating online leagues, the use of total score as a tiebreaker is not a great system, but with 3-player games there was really no other choice. The low-scoring third game and my inability to get the tiles I needed at the end of the first game cost a spot in the quarterfinals.

I stayed to watch the rest of the tournament. The quarterfinals featured four head-to-head games, but then instead of two semifinals and a final, the four quarterfinal winners all played a final 4-player game to determine the winner. This didn’t seem very fair but it was an intriguing game to watch. A very nice woman named Nuria who I had talked to last year and again this year won the game and the tournament (playing as yellow in the shot below). Her prize was to choose between four other Devir games, and she chose The Travels of Marco Polo.



A nice touch this year was that all 30 participants received a gift for participating - the Cundco halflings. So all in all it was a nice Carcassonne day and although I was frustrated that I didn’t qualify, I played better than last year and I think I showed that I was in the same league as the best players there. Hopefully I'll be back again next year!

[Decar]

All in all it sounds like you had a good day. It's a shame that points difference is the only tool to separate plays when a draw occurs. As the LMS tournament shows this can vary wildly.  I hope in the future we can gather enough evidence to correctly rate games like chess or go.

It sounds like you took control of the games you did win. And it's good your first game didnt affect your others.

It's good to hear a nice lady one too. No one likes it when a meany wins!

Great photos too, but dont you hate it when you decide to take a photo after final scoring. I've done this far too often recently.

A merit for your write up.

[danisthirty]

Well despite not going all the way, it sounds like you had a good time JB and did well to win the two games that you did. Tough break on the game that you didn’t win too, it’s always nice when you just don’t get the tiles!

There is a strange assumption amongst tournament organisers that bigger scores = better skillz. This is true to some degree in that you need to have a higher score than your opponents in order to beat them, but someone who won a 3-player game with 70 points is no better or worse than someone who won a 3-player game with 90 points because those points are only relevant within the context of the games in which they were scored.

I’m not a big fan of car racing but I played Formula D last week and it was brilliant so I’ve come up with the following analogy: Imagine if Formula One was arranged by splitting all the drivers into four groups and letting each group race each other on a selection of tracks such that each group races on a quarter of all tracks. At the end of the season, one driver from each group has won all of their races and the organisers don’t have time for them to have another race. So, they sum up the total time taken for each driver and declare the overall winner based on this, even though all of the tracks are completely differently, they haven’t considered winning margins and none of them have raced each other on the same track.

Admittedly, the question of deciding who should advance when players are tied on tournament points (as was the case here, and also at the UK Carcassonne championships this year) is a tricky one, and I won’t pretend that I have the answer. But it really isn’t as simple as just summing individual game scores together, and it’s annoying when quality players like you JB fall foul of inadequate systems.

Merit for your report though!