Carcassonne Central

Carc Central Community => Reviews & Session Reports => Topic started by: jungleboy on April 21, 2016, 12:09:21 PM

Title: First game with Carcassonne: the Castle - Falcon expansion
Post by: jungleboy on April 21, 2016, 12:09:21 PM
Today I finally played my first game of Carcassonne: the Castle with the Falcon expansion that quevy made. As you all know by now, the Castle is easily my favourite Carcassonne spin-off, so it is exciting to have a full-sized expansion (18 tiles) for it!

Firstly, my regular partner is very good at the Castle. I lose against her almost every time, yet surprisingly I still like the game! Today was no different; she slaughtered me 128-56! Her 128 was easily the biggest score we’ve seen in the Castle, but that’s to be expected with the extra tiles.

So I won’t go into the gory details of how I got destroyed. Instead I’ll offer a few observations about the Falcon expansion.

- First, let me say again that the quality of the work from quevy is really high. The tiles look wonderful and very professionally done!

- Overall I thought the expansion added a lot more depth to the game, so I really liked it despite the score. There are essentially three new elements (chapel tiles, falcon aerie tokens and the king follower which works like the prophet in the Ark of the Covenant except you can use it multiple times).

- One thing that’s interesting is that there are a lot more opportunity for bigger single scores now, with the chapel and with the king follower. But if you score high-scoring features, you’ll miss many wall tiles along the way, so you need to balance those two things out.

- Because the chapels score more and more points as they get bigger (from just 3 points for a 2-tile chapel to 36 for 8 tiles), you definitely find yourself closing off your opponents’ chapels before they get too big. So you have to watch out for that and try to limit the potential of your opponent’s chapels.

- At first when I saw the aerie rules I thought it was pretty weak to have it score the same points as the biggest keep. But after playing with it I thought it was quite interesting. My opponent had the bigger keep and as we got closer to the end of the game I knew I couldn’t make a bigger one, so I focused on winning the most aerie tokens instead to neutralise her keep. So I think it’s cool that it’s basically a ‘double or nothing’ proposition.

- I like the rule that the king and falconer followers can’t be placed on a tile that completes a feature, similar to the rule in Carcassonne: the City where you can’t do this for even normal followers. In both cases there is a good reason for this; with the Falcon you have to think in advance about where you want to place these followers knowing that you may never finish the feature to achieve the bonus.

- I really like the placement of the first gate between 27 and 28 on the castle walls. If you know the game, you'll know that this section of the regular game is where there is a 2x2 square (so space for four tiles) somewhat isolated from the rest of the board. Usually we never place tiles in this area, because you can't expand much and you could get trapped up against the walls. But the gate does two things: first, it opens up the area to become bigger and therefore giving you more opportunities, and secondly, you can place a tile against the gate so it encourages placement in this area. In fact, I placed my first tile there and that whole section of the board quickly filled up.

Here are some photos of the board at various stages:

(http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160421/a4d50e131a0719bc87bbe9c963859e58.jpg)

(http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160421/d8668a762d0a6fca019e6bf2c7655f33.jpg)

(http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160421/205415ebc515d034a62bd6e11e8b92b4.jpg)

(http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160421/0a9414be6f72015b54fd4bd9891997c5.jpg)
Title: Re: First game with Carcassonne: the Castle - Falcon expansion
Post by: jungleboy on May 26, 2016, 09:46:04 AM
Second game with the Falcon today and I won for once! It can be awfully lonely in those chapels though!

(http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160526/1f83c9b8913216c77d786617ffbb0ed1.jpg)