Carcassonne Central
Carc Central Community => Reviews & Session Reports => Topic started by: wolnic on June 20, 2016, 02:58:26 PM
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MrsW suggested that we play a game at the weekend with all the CarcII tiles I have. That introduced her tsome tiles that we'd previously used as landscape, but not scored thematically - such as the Stone Circles and Woodcutters - it was a really interesting experiment to see how some of these expansions worked in a big game, or as with the Woodcutters, with all the tiles I've designed (but not yet released into the wild). So, 4 hours later 330 tiles were laid out across our large dining table, made up from :-
- Base Set, I&C, B&T - don't own "Princess and Dragon" yet
- The Coast + extra Coast + some first draft Coast tiles (~60 tiles)
- The River + Fluvium + extra River tiles (~40 tiles)
- Wells II + a few unreleased Wells tiles (20 tiles)
- Stone Circles (9 tiles)
- The Astronomers (8 tiles) based on CarcI version by Decar
- Woodcutters (~70 tiles)
- and a few extra City tiles
We regularly play with The Phantom to help pick up loose points. Scores were around the 500 mark. MrsW got both Cathedral cities, while I seemed to get most of The Cloisters, Astronomers and Stone Circle tiles. We laid out the central sea first, then laid out all the river tiles, and only once we started using the regular tiles did we place followers. With only two of us we tend to keep out of each other's way - other than the odd blocking tile here or there making it more difficult to close a city. And with such a large starting layout, usually no need to get in on the other's action. I won by about 70 points.
The Stone Circles ended up on a couple of straight lines, but it was often frustrating when about to play a cloisters as the most obvious location was next to a Stone Circle, or vice versa. On a few occasions we just used the Astronomer tiles and the Stone Circles tiles to fill in the landscape (to help expand a field, or just fill a gap) and ignored the bonus points that would have come from the tile's theme!
The patches of woodland were quite difficult to close off unless they happened to already be surrounded by other tiles, and scoring them wasn't that easy, so I may try having the woods go to the edge of the tile (as with the Forests expansions for Carc I), but allowing them to be placed next to field edges, in a later release.
In the second game (ending around 02:30 - we just couldn't stop ourselves playing again - it's an addiction (which you all know already!)) I got both the Cathedrals but had trouble finishing one of the cities, so MrsW won by around 70 points - honours even! The end layout is below.
Need more tiles to fill the table ...
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Of course I am very intrigued by that blurred out RFRF tile! :)
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I really like the combination of these tiles. The game really looks whole with the large sea, woods, and more themed river tiles. Some of those cloisters on the river, and the cities intermingling with the river are just epic. :(y)
If all these custom tilesets were easily available, and even included in the CarcII box or expansions, I'd be way more excited to pick it up. Instead of just rereleasing the expansions, they should be creating whole new tilesets. I'm still building out my Carc I collection, but the CarcII purchase will be in near future -- decision is even easier with these custom tile collections. 8)
Great all around job here. Time for me to get everything together to make some custom tiles.
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Crikey! I thought we were ambitious here. Love seeing the big sea in the middle.
Makes me want to fire up a new save of Civ 4. ;D