Yesterday I was on a boardgame fair. Unfortunately, nobody of my gaming group had time to join. I was made aware of this event a few days ago by kettlefish, and although they all had been at this fair few years ago, they did not notice it happens this weekend and had other plans for it already, when I mentioned it last Thursday. So I had to arrange with other people on location to play some games, but still was able, to try out three games:
The Legend of Andor:
We played a 4 player game and won the introduction scenario (which is quite simple), although we made at least a couple of rule mistakes. We did not take the reward for the first 4 or 5 creatures, we slayed, and later missed to execute one of the "Legend Cards", which would have brought more monsters to the board. (Not, that that would have altered the outcome of the game. The monsters do not attack the group by themselves and are just to be prevented to reach their destination, a "castle", which they would not have from the spots they showed up till the end of the game. Plus, we would have ignored them anyway, because killing monsters trigger the end of the game faster. There might also have been, that we used some wrong event cards, meant for later legends. For better or worse, but more likely for worse, the events all seemed pretty bad for me, anyway. But one of them took no effect at all, because it would have weaken all characters equipped with a ring, and there was no way, anybody would have gotten a ring in this scenario.
Cacao:
Recommendation of kettlefish, I played a 3P game, came in second, and really liked it. The others compared it to Carcassonne, but I found it quite different, although it's as well a tile laying game. None of main game mechanisms, laying tiles in a checker board way distinguishing "neutral" and "player tiles", activating workers by closing edges, etc., really remind me of Carcassonne. Not sure, if it would have the same long replayability like Carc, but the first game was truly enjoyable.
Cornwall:
Now, that was really a Carc-Clone. I won the 3P game. It sure has it's own flavours. The mechanism, that you do not return your followers right after scoring, but have to meet and pay them in a pub, I found quite intriguing. It sure is more different to regular Carc then one of the "spin offs", but for me, although I would never turn down the opportunity to play it, I doubt, I would ever put it to my collection, which I want to have more variety in. And it is sure not great enough to replace Carc. It even shares the attribute with Carcassone, that it comes with a scoring board to small. I ended the game on the third loop (aprox. 100 points on a 40 point loop trail), while the other two also were on the second one.