Carcassonne Central

Carc Central Community => Reviews & Session Reports => Topic started by: dirk2112 on January 30, 2019, 06:31:13 AM

Title: The Circus comes to a town full of fruit trees
Post by: dirk2112 on January 30, 2019, 06:31:13 AM
We have played the Circus (AKA Under the Big Top) before and my wife loves it.  The fruit trees expansion works in a similar manner.  There are little disks that contain hidden points and everything works by surrounding the tile.  The similarity made the fruit tree expansion easy to teach.   

Review of the Fruit tree:
We really enjoyed the fruit tree expansion.  The points are nice, the game play is fun, and the rules aren't too complex.  I think I would prefer if the selling action was done in a different way (maybe a market tile, when a city with a flag is completed, or something).  The really big down side of the expansion is how dumb it looks.  I know the people of Carcassonne are known for poor urban planning, but building roads right into trees is just silly.  The 2 tiles that do not have roads, on the other hand, look great. 

Playing the Fruit tree with the Circus:
While they were easy to play together because of similar rules, the expansions do not work as well together as I would have thought.  The circus tiles and ringmaster meeple score a lot more points than the fruit trees can provide.  My wife scored over 340 points with just these 2 expansions and I believe fruit trees provided her with at most 40 of those points.  I lost badly, but I did score at least 30 fruit tree points.   The Circus is very over powered and it probably becomes less so when you play with other expansions.  We had a few clusters of 3 acrobat/circus tiles in a row.  Closing nearby cities or a small road with the ringmaster gave us 6 bonus points (more than the cities or roads were worth).  It also helped to have some acrobats near the circuses to grab extra points when it moves.   

I believe in a game with a lot of little expansions the fruit trees would be a big winner.  You can't easily score 30 or more points with the windroses, the ferries, goldmines, etc. 

I wonder if future new art expansions will continue to have the point creep of the Circus and Fruit Tree expansions.