My match with Rosco got off to a bit of a rocky start. We used the new version of JCloisterZone (2.7) for our first game and Rosco lulled me into a false sense of security by allowing me to trap 5 of his meeples with 28 tiles left to play! However, he then used his strange and mysterious voodoo powers to crash the game which was rather annoying for me as we'd played more than half of it and it would almost certainly have been a good win for me (I had a 19-point lead and Rosco had very little scoring potential with just 2 meeples to play with).
(the circled cloister was the last tile I placed but Rosco never saw this and whilst it was Rosco's turn as far as I was concerned, JCZ at his end thought it was still my turn so we ended up in a bit of a deadlock)
In any case, we reverted back to JCZ 2.6 to replay our first game but this also crashed after about a dozen tiles. I don't know what happened, but when I went to place a tile JCZ got confused about whose turn it was and suddenly seemed to think that I was red rather than blue, refusing to let me place a follower or even just place the tile leaving it unclaimed. We decided to give it one final try and went back to JCZ 2.7 again for our third attempt at our first game and didn't encounter any further problems...
Fortunately, the two games we did play were worth waiting for and extremely close! I started the first game which got off to a good start for me with a couple of small cities and short roads, but Ross never seemed to be far behind. I'm rarely the first player to farm in a head-to-head game but I bucked that trend in this game and was the first to lay claim to what looked like it could turn into a fairly worthwhile farm. Ross wasn't going to let me take it without a fight though and a few tiles later he also had a farmer on the same farm and we left it at that for a little while.
There weren't any particularly huge cities but there was one in particular that we both struggled for. I can't remember who claimed it first but we both had one knight each in it soon afterwards. Ross made a move to get a second knight into it and I responded by putting a second knight of my own adjacent to it such that both or neither of our second knights would be joined in with a cccx tile. As the focus of the game then shifted towards the main farm, I made an attempt to secure it with a second farmer but inadvertently gave Ross an opportunity to steal the city in doing so. It was a risk but he took it, and then followed this up by closing any open sides to prevent me from matching his third knight soon afterwards. Then we both sat back to see who would be lucky enough to draw the cccc tile which he desperately needed to join his third knight into the city and complete it in the process. I spent most of the rest of the game making sure that there was at least one other place to put the tile if I drew it but it didn't come to this as Rosco drew it and completed the city for 30 points. This was the worst thing that could happen as far as I was concerned but there was still a chance of me winning as long as I could hold on to the main farm.
Ross became increasingly desperate to get a third farmer onto the farm as the number of tiles left dropped into single-digits, and I grew equally desperate to make sure that he didn't! I breathed a big sigh of relief every time I saw what tile he'd drawn, realising that he couldn't use it to get onto the farm, and used my tiles purely to make this as difficult as possible for him to do so!
Although my nerves were shattered by the end of the game, I did manage to maintain majority control of the farm which ended up being worth 24 points. I took a further 6 points for an adjacent farm, 16 points from two incomplete cloisters and 7 points from a road bringing my total score to 116. Rosco finished 13 points behind me with 4 farmers being worth nothing (2 on the main farm against my 3, and 2 others that were never joined on), 3 points from a small farm and 4 points from an incomplete city. His final score was 103:
(the 30-point city helped Rosco to his 45-point lead in this area, but I was able to make up for most of this on cloisters and farms and also won on roads by 15 points which made up most of my winning margin)
If our first game had felt close (which it most certainly had), our second game was even closer and took such concentration and focus that I'd almost forgotten how to talk by the end of it when my wife asked how it had gone!
Ross got off to a very strong start by completing several small cities and drawing 4 cloisters (all of which he claimed). I did my best to keep up with him but couldn't compete with how quickly he was completing his cloisters and soon dropped behind even after completing a cloister of my own. I made the best of a bad situation by embarking on a somewhat lengthy (but ultimately successful) operation to trap two of his meeples in adjacent cloisters, reducing his supply to 5 meeples. Although this felt like a small victory at the time, I was only too well aware that these would be worth a fair amount of points in the final scoring and that I already had a sizeable mountain to climb if I wanted to win the match...
This time Ross was the first to place an early farmer but I quickly hit back with two of my own. This probably wasn't the best tactic as I spent the rest of the game struggling through lack of meeples whereas Ross added two more farmers of his own much later in the game. This put me under an enormous amount of pressure to respond, even though I wasn't really able to by then!
I mostly tried to share points wherever I could but this didn't work well as I was already behind and needed to generate some points of my own if I wanted to win. I was simply unable to do this though as Ross either matched me or cut me off with every opportunity and I rarely had the meeples (or the guts) to fight back. As such, Ross was the first to claim a long road which we ended up sharing (my attempt to steal this from him ended up with my second thief being cut-off by a t-junction) and a city of mine became a shared dumping ground which neither of us were interested in stealing.
A win seemed very unlikely for me when Ross took control of the main farm with 3 farmers but I was lucky in the final quarter of the game and seemed to get meeples back just as I needed them. I got a third farmer of my own onto the farm, but my unlikely attempt to get a cheeky fourth farmer was quickly suppressed. Having spent most of the game behind on points, the turning point for me was completing a 14-point city which gave me almost enough of a lead to counter the points he would gain from his incomplete cloisters (as long as the farm remained shared).
Although I'd never have thought it possible, the final few tiles were even more agonising than the final few tiles of our previous game! I ended up with 2 meeples in my supply which I used to claim a medium-sized city that had kind of emerged without either of us taking much of an interest in, and a final 2-point city that I claimed more because the points were available as a result of my trying to block Ross' last-ditched attempt to win the farm. I don't think I've ever been quite so tense as I was waiting for the final scores window to pop up as Ross placed the final tile, and I felt a huge rush of relief and then surprise when I saw that it was a tie: 125 each! This was a good result for me, and about as much as I could have hoped for under the circumstances!
I ended up being 3 points behind on farms as Ross had a secondary farm serving just one city, and I was 24 points behind on cloisters. However, I won on roads by 5 points and 22 points for my cities which brought the final scores level.
So the final match scores were either 2 - 1 or 1 - 0 depending on whether you count a tie as a win or a loss. Either way, my victory in the first game meant that the match was a win for me. This said, my matches seem to have gotten closer and closer as the league has progressed and I must thank Ross for two of the most engrossing games of Carcassonne I've ever played!
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