Agree with you both! My girlfriend and I also found it had a nice, co-operative feel for most of the game, with both players joining pyramids or being jointly invested in the circus tent reveal. Not sure that it would scale well to playing with lots of expansions together, but it was more enjoyably 'different' and quirky than I was expecting.
The Ringmaster feels a little underpowered though... I kept forgetting to use him!
My wife and I played a multi-expansion game last night (second game with Under the Big Top) with the following expansions:
- Base game
- The River
- Inns and Cathedrals
- Traders and Builders
- The Princess and the Dragon
- Mayor and Abbey
- Under the Big Top
- Watchtowers
- The Festival
- Labyrinth, Spiel 15, and Spiel 16
When we play big games like this, it is always a nice surprise when one of the special or unique tiles comes up, but it was particularly fun last night every time a circus-type tile appeared. We discovered that our tendency was to keep all circus type tiles near each other, to work together, and that the dragon became less of a game piece because we didn't want to destroy our circus work. We moved the fairy to our acrobats quite a bit. Ringmaster was utilized pretty well, about 6 times each, by each of us, and always it seemed to claim a feature attached to a circus. His bonus points were nice to include. The anticipation of the animal score value was fun, with our highest score happening when we had two acrobat tiles surrounding the big top as an elephant appeared.
As for scoring, I won 566 to 549. Insane.
All in all, we typically play with 1-2 large expansions and a small expansion each time we play. I anticipate this will become one we use quite often. In fact, we talked about a "fun" themed game, with Base, River, Festival, and UTBT as well as our three promo tiles. In my opinion, it is a solid expansion.
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and still looking.
