Citrus

[jungleboy]

I played my first game of Citrus today (and my first game of Aqua Romana too, but let’s focus on Citrus).



My opponent and I both really liked it. She won by about 15 points but it was really close the whole way. It’s a medium-depth game that’s pretty easy to learn and after a couple of rounds you understand how the game works, but still feel as though it'll take 2-3 plays before you figure out what a good strategy is.

To summarise the game really quickly, it’s a tile-laying game where you are trying to build plantations of five citrus fruits (lemons, oranges, blood oranges, limes and grapefruits). You score points by harvesting these plantations and by controlling the fincas (farmhouses) that the plantations surround. There’s an interesting mechanic regarding the workers who work your plantations (the more workers you have in your fields, the more you have to pay them once you harvest a plantation, so the less gold you receive for that harvest). 

Each turn, you must choose between building plantations or harvesting plantations. This decision is usually pretty simple, as you need money to build and you get money from harvesting, so if you’re out of money you have no choice and must harvest. The bigger decisions in the game are what to harvest when, and which plantation tiles to choose and build/extend, because you need to keep your plantations unharvested to win the fincas, but you need to harvest them to get money to build more plantations.

To compare it a bit with Carcassonne, one similarity is that there’s a good combination of in-game scoring and end-game scoring (by scoring unharvested plantations, incomplete fincas and the wild horses bonus tiles), so you need to keep your eye on both. There are also bonus tokens that you can acquire which remind me of the wall tiles in Carcassonne: the Castle, and these are important both throughout the game and at the end of the game. One major difference is that there’s no glomming on and no other ‘negative’ interaction between the players, which is nice.

Overall I’d say the depth level, tile-laying aspect and the artwork/components make Citrus an excellent choice for fans of Carcassonne. We’ll definitely play it again soon!



Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2749.0

[franks]

Very good write up Jungleboy, thanks for sharing! Good on you for getting newer games to the table!

[jungleboy]

Very good write up Jungleboy, thanks for sharing! Good on you for getting newer games to the table!

Thanks! I *did* bring 7 games back from the Oxford meet up, so the least I can do is play them! I've got 6 of them to the table so far, all except Lanterns.

[Decar]

Nice report jungleboy. +1 for it and the photos were nice too!

[jungleboy]

Second game of Citrus today and even though I lost again, I continue to be really impressed with this game!

[Decar]

That's a busy board - this is on my Essen list!

[Decar]

Bringing this post back to life to let jungelboy know that DLP Games is releasing a game called Altiplano at Essen this year:
http://www.dlp-games.de/sonstiges/altiplano/a-1014/

From the designer of Orleans.

It looks on the expensive side, but hopefully there will be some more details announced soon to justify the cost!

[jungleboy]

Just in case anyone wants to seriously get into the theme of citrus fruits on the Iberian peninsula before playing this game, here's some background information that I stumbled across regarding oranges and citrus fruits in the region while doing this course:

The orange, like the noria, is associated in popular or semilearned history with the Arabs, to whom its importation to the West from India in the tenth century was almost universally ascribed by historians of the nineteenth century and before. Like so many other elements of Islamic horticulture, it was present in Roman times, in Italy as early as the first century A.D. Citriculture was revived by the Arabs, and under their rule it spread from Persia to Spain. (It should be pointed out that, according to ibn Khaldûn the fourteenth-century Arab historian, oranges were considered inedible and were planted only for appearance.) The Patio de los Naranjos of the Córdoba mosque remains a symbol of Islamic devotion to the orange. Al-Shakund, a thirteenth-century Andalusí, wrote in his famous Risâla that "most of the houses of Seville, not to say all, were abundantly planted with fruit trees, such as the orange, the lemon, the lime, and the citron." Oranges continued to be grown in Christian Valencia as an ornamental luxury crop. From Spain the Conquistadors carried orange seeds to the New World, where by 1600 there were important groves in Peru and Chile. Ponce de León probably was responsible for the first Florida oranges and Spanish missionaries for those of California. The Valencia orange has now become the "universal orange" in the United States. (Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia, 185-186).

[Vinçon]

Just in case anyone wants to seriously get into the theme of citrus fruits on the Iberian peninsula before playing this game, here's some background information that I stumbled across regarding oranges and citrus fruits in the region while doing this course:

To expand on this: I live in Spain, between Barcelona and Valencia and my family owns a few fincas, some of them with oranges, mandarins and lemons growing.

It's quite common here so I guess I can help anyone who wants to know some more about it. AMA!

[jungleboy]

Tonight I played Citrus for the first time in ages, and it was great to get it to the table again. Although I will say that we played it at the maximum player count (5), and I thought this was too many, as the board was super tight. I came fourth in the end although I was only two points away from second.

[franks]

Nice you got this played again!

Mine still sits on the shelf    I must make more effort on this one. It does look like good fun!