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Topics - jungleboy

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16
General / What's your favourite piece of Carcassonne wood?
« on: January 15, 2017, 03:36:00 PM »
First off, my son absolutely loves the dragon. The meeple itself is probably the best piece of wood for Carcassonne.

I saw this comment in another thread today and it got me thinking: what is the best piece of wood in Carcassonne? To find out what you all think, let's make a poll. To keep the poll from getting out of hand, I didn't list all the wood but instead listed 12 options and an 'other' choice for standard Carcassonne and its expansions (not including spin-offs).

Use whatever criteria you like to make your choice, and explain your reasons below!

Edit: Added the Mayor. I'd forgotten about Mr Baggy Pants!

17
Other Games / Board game components
« on: January 15, 2017, 03:24:32 PM »
I noticed at BGG yesterday that a user has started a blog about board game components. And, whaddayaknow, the first game featured on their blog is Carcassonne: Winter Edition. Patchwork will be next.

I'm interested in components and photography so I'll follow this blog with interest. I also thought we could build a thread around it by highlighting games with great/interesting components, regardless of whether they're on this blog or not. We already have a thread for wooden pieces in board games, but maybe a catch-all component thread could also have value.

Which board games do you like the components of?

18
General / 2017 Big Box - content speculation
« on: January 05, 2017, 02:04:02 AM »
We've heard that a Big Box with the new artwork is coming in 2017. But what will be in it?

This is what has been released or announced in the new art so far (please add in anything that I've missed)

- Base game
- River
- Abbot (just meeples)
- Inns and Cathedrals
- Traders and Builders
- Princess and the Dragon
- The Tower
- Abbey and Mayor
- King, Count and Consort
- Bridges, Castles and Bazaars
- The 10th expansion
- Watchtowers
- Festival
- Japanese Temples
- One labyrinth tile

Here is Decar's rundown of the five previous big boxes. Every one contained the base game, Inns and Cathedrals and Traders and Builders, so I think we can expect all of that to be in this new big box. But what else?

The first three big boxes all contained 2-3 other large expansions in addition to I&C and T&B. As large expansions dried up, the fourth and fifth big boxes contained different things instead (minis, a WoF version, a new river implementation etc). All large expansions except the Catapult (which also has not been printed in new art) were in at least one big box, and P&D was in all three first big boxes.

I would say, given that its the first big box in the new art, that it is more likely to go back to the large expansion model of big boxes 1-3, rather than the small exclusive items that we saw in Big Box 5. So I would expect 2-3 more large expansions beyond I&C and T&B. And I'll speculate that P&D and A&M will be in it, and I guess the abbot meeples because gardens are in every major expansion.

What are your thoughts?

19
General / Why and where to buy missing expansions
« on: January 04, 2017, 02:51:19 AM »
but I think I got as much old art Carcassonne as I am going to get.   

What are you missing?

20
Reviews & Session Reports / Epic 'final' game of Carcassonne
« on: January 01, 2017, 02:34:30 AM »
Yesterday afternoon I had my last games session with my friend Aimé before I move to a new country on Friday. We played Indigo (with junglegirl too), Carcassonne: the Castle (with Falcon expansion!), Istanbul, Lost Cities, and symbolically ended with Carcassonne, since that's what we've played the most over the last 3-4 years since we started playing games together.

The Carcassonne game featured Traders & Builders, the Tower, German castles, the Spielbox halflings and the phantom, and this was an epic game. Aimé (black) led by as many as 52 points at one stage (it's so easy to pile up the points early on with the bonus points from the features connected to the German castles and with the phantom) but I fought back to get the scores even during the last quarter of the game and then it came down to the huge farm. I originally had two meeples to her none, but one of them was kidnapped by the tower. She managed to get three in at one stage but I kidnapped two of them. Eventually we tied it and it came down to the other, smaller end-game scoring points. She won two of the three trade goods which I guess was the difference in the end and she won by four points. Regardless, it was a really great game to finish off our Carcassonne rivalry - for now.


21
General / Carcassonne Highlights in 2016
« on: November 24, 2016, 04:08:15 AM »
As another year starts to wind down, I thought it would be fun if we discussed our Carcassonne highlights for the year. There's still a few weeks to go until the end of the year but that will give everyone time to think about their highlights and add them to the thread!

2016 is the year that I finally ventured out of the Carcassonne universe and discovered other games (with Chooselife and Decar largely to blame for this), but there were still some great Carcassonne moments. Since I own pretty much everything I want to own already, my list is less about acquisitions and more about meet-ups and 'experiences'.

Here are my highlights (in no particular order):

- Meeting danisthirty and Decar in London early in the year and playing my first game of South Seas with them.

- The Oxford meetup with a group of CC members, where I played my first game of New World (which I quite liked).

- The 'Carcathon' with JT Atomico, Halfling and Curt in July, where we played 20 Carcassonne games back-to-back in one crazy day. Unfortunately I played terribly more or less all day but it was still a great experience, plus I played a bunch of new Carcassonne games. Cardcassonne surprisingly stood out as a pretty cool little game.

- Receiving a shrinkwrapped version of Cathars by surprise/accident from Cundco instead of the German Cathedrals that I had ordered.

- Playing two World Cup games in person: one against Grabushka at Essen and one against Chooselife in "the greatest city in the world", Estoril. 

- Essen: Meeting Jéré, Grabushka, MrNumbers and Skane, and playing my first game of Amazonas with danisthirty and Decar at Essen. Decar really likes drawing river tiles!

22
Other Games / Organisers and storage for other games
« on: September 26, 2016, 01:16:13 PM »
We all spend plenty of time making and/or thinking about Carcassonne storage. But what about other games?

After buying Isle of Skye yesterday, I punched out the pieces today and there are quite a lot of different components. I saw this organiser and it looks great, but spending 50%+ of the game price on organisers is not really a great idea long-term.



What organisers/dividers/storage solutions do you have for other games and do you recommend them? Post pictures and links in this thread.

23
News and Events / Carcassonne Games Marathon: July 2nd in London
« on: June 09, 2016, 01:16:46 PM »
A month ago, an idea was hatched by Halfling to play all Carcassonne versions and spin-offs in one sitting (Alternative World Record Attempt 2016?).

After some discussion in that thread and plenty of personal messages in the past few weeks, today we are pleased to officially announce that this event will take place on Saturday, July 2nd, a mere 1230km from Carcassonne in London, England. The four participants are Halfling, JT Atomico, Curt194 and jungleboy and the location will be Draughts Board Game Café.

 :black1-meeple: :blue-meeple: :green-meeple: :red-meeple: :gray-meeple: :violet-meeple: :pink-meeple: :orange-meeple: :white-meeple: :brown-meeple: :neutral-meeple: :yellow-meeple:

Thanks to JT's incredible Carcassonne collection, the 19 games we will attempt to play in 14 hours are, in this order:

Carcassonne (2000)
Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers (2002)
The Ark of the Covenant (2003)
Carcassonne: The Castle (2003)
Carcassonne: The City (2004)
Carcassonne: The Discovery (2005)
Travel Carcassonne (2007)
New World (2008)
My First Carcassonne (2009)
Carcassonne: Wheel of Fortune (2009)
Cardcassonne (2009)
Carcassonne: The Dice Game (2011)
Carcassonne: Winter Edition (2012)
Carcassonne: South Seas (2013)
Carcassonne: Gold Rush (2014)
Carcassonne II (2014)
Carcassonne: Demo version (2015)
Carcassonne: Over Hill and Dale (2015)
Carcassonne: Star Wars (2015)

 :black1-meeple: :blue-meeple: :green-meeple: :red-meeple: :gray-meeple: :violet-meeple: :pink-meeple: :orange-meeple: :white-meeple: :brown-meeple: :neutral-meeple: :yellow-meeple:

Of these 19 games, Carcassonne: The Castle and Carcassonne: Demo Version are two-player games, so for both these two games we will separate into pairs and play two games so that all four players can play all 19 games.

We are hoping to document the event with photos and video, and of course we will record the results from each game to see who wins the day. Please follow this thread in the lead-up to the event for more details and feel free to post comments and questions. And of course, we'll try to provide as much documentation as possible on the day of the event, with more detailed reports in the days following.

24
Other Games / Citrus
« on: May 22, 2016, 11:32:22 AM »
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!


25
Other Games / Limes
« on: May 06, 2016, 11:25:53 AM »
I bought Limes last week as part of my Oxford meetup purchase madness. Decar asked for a review, so here it is.



Limes is a card-laying game for 1-2 people that plays very quickly (10-15 minutes). The two-player game is 100% multiplayer solitaire, so even though I've only played it solo so far (12 plays), the review is valid for the two-player game as well.

I describe Limes as a combination of Carcassonne, Karuba, and the Little Prince. Carcassonne because you place meeples to claim one of four features; Karuba because in the two-player game, one player is the 'caller' who draws a card and calls out the number in the centre of it, after which both players play the same card; and the Little Prince because you will finish with a 4x4 square of 16 cards (with 8 cards left unplayed for each player).

Firstly, let me say that I love the game. The theme of the game has nothing to do with small green citrus fruits, and is instead a reference to ancient Roman border defensive systems, such as the Limes Germanicus which bridged the gap between the Rhine and Danube frontiers. I'm a Roman history buff, so this is right up my alley.

Each player has seven meeples to play with (and, again, 16 cards to play). You never 'complete' a feature in the Carcassonne sense, so you can't reuse a meeple and score multiple times with it. What you can do, however, is move a meeple to an adjacent feature on a turn in which you don't play a meeple. So if you realise that you've missed the boat on playing a meeple on a certain card, you can place a card adjacent or nearby, place your meeple, and eventually move it over to where you want it.

Each card is divided into four zones, each depicting one of the four features. It's possible to have the same feature twice on one card, either diagonally to each other (in different zones), or adjacent (as part of the same zone). The four features you can claim are rivers (as a fisherman/ferryman), forests (woodcutter), towers (watchman) or field (farmer). I think the strongest aspect of the gameplay is that all four features are scored differently yet are scored more or less equally. In any given game, any one of your seven workers in four distinct roles could be worth the most. This contrasts with Carcassonne, where scoring favours farms and cities at the expense of cloisters and roads.

Briefly, the scoring works like this: farmers score one point per zone (so per 1/4th of a card) in a connected field - so like a road in Carcassonne. If you have a farm with eight connected zones, you score eight points. Fishermen score one point per hut that is on the river bank of the river your fisherman is in - so the larger the river, the more points you are likely to score from huts, but not necessarily. Woodcutters score one point per different zone that is adjacent to the forest the woodcutter is in, so the larger the forest, the better, but if a forest extends for four zones adjacent to a river of four zones, that's only one point for that section, not four (towers, however, always count as separate zones for this purpose, even when two or more are adjacent). Watchmen score one point per forest zone they can see orthogonally, as long as that view is not interrupted by another tower.

So the game is mostly about maximising the scoring for workers you've already placed while trying not to hurt the scoring of other workers, because it doesn't always work in harmony. If you have a large river or farm, that's great, but if you claim a forest that's surrounded by this river or farm, that's not great. You might want to extend a farm in one space on one hand, but you might also want to add forests to that space for your watchman on the other hand.

Some other things I like are the artwork, which is simple but pleasing; the fact that you don't play all your cards in any one game, so learning the configurations doesn't necessarily help; and the fact that you always end up with a nice 4x4 grid. Each game is different because of the random card draw, but it's not hugely luck-dependant with the draw like Carcassonne can be. No matter what cards you draw and in what order, the equal worker scoring means that you still have an opportunity to maximise your score with good planning and decision-making (i.e. there's no real equivalent of the Carcassonne experience of drawing road after road when all you want is to extend your builder city).

There is a pro variant where each feature scores in two different ways, not just one. I haven't played that yet (I don't want to get too far ahead of my potential 2-player partner who hasn't played yet), but that will certainly add more complexity to the game. There are also a couple of promo expansions to change it up a bit.

This is a photo of my highest score so far - 51 (49+ is considered excellent according to the rule book). If you're super keen, you can try to count up the score to see how the scoring works. Also, here's a post I wrote on BGG using some statistics to analyse strategy in the game through my first 10 plays.

 

Even though the lack of gameplay interaction between players in a two-player game might not suit everyone, the fact that it's a quick game means this isn't really a big deal, in my opinion. If you like the look of these two photos and if you're the kind of Carcassonne player who likes to analyse the board each turn and figure out what the best-scoring move is with any given tile, then Limes is definitely for you.

26
Today I finally played my first game of Carcassonne: the Castle with the Falcon expansion that quevy made. As you all know by now, the Castle is easily my favourite Carcassonne spin-off, so it is exciting to have a full-sized expansion (18 tiles) for it!

Firstly, my regular partner is very good at the Castle. I lose against her almost every time, yet surprisingly I still like the game! Today was no different; she slaughtered me 128-56! Her 128 was easily the biggest score we’ve seen in the Castle, but that’s to be expected with the extra tiles.

So I won’t go into the gory details of how I got destroyed. Instead I’ll offer a few observations about the Falcon expansion.

- First, let me say again that the quality of the work from quevy is really high. The tiles look wonderful and very professionally done!

- Overall I thought the expansion added a lot more depth to the game, so I really liked it despite the score. There are essentially three new elements (chapel tiles, falcon aerie tokens and the king follower which works like the prophet in the Ark of the Covenant except you can use it multiple times).

- One thing that’s interesting is that there are a lot more opportunity for bigger single scores now, with the chapel and with the king follower. But if you score high-scoring features, you’ll miss many wall tiles along the way, so you need to balance those two things out.

- Because the chapels score more and more points as they get bigger (from just 3 points for a 2-tile chapel to 36 for 8 tiles), you definitely find yourself closing off your opponents’ chapels before they get too big. So you have to watch out for that and try to limit the potential of your opponent’s chapels.

- At first when I saw the aerie rules I thought it was pretty weak to have it score the same points as the biggest keep. But after playing with it I thought it was quite interesting. My opponent had the bigger keep and as we got closer to the end of the game I knew I couldn’t make a bigger one, so I focused on winning the most aerie tokens instead to neutralise her keep. So I think it’s cool that it’s basically a ‘double or nothing’ proposition.

- I like the rule that the king and falconer followers can’t be placed on a tile that completes a feature, similar to the rule in Carcassonne: the City where you can’t do this for even normal followers. In both cases there is a good reason for this; with the Falcon you have to think in advance about where you want to place these followers knowing that you may never finish the feature to achieve the bonus.

- I really like the placement of the first gate between 27 and 28 on the castle walls. If you know the game, you'll know that this section of the regular game is where there is a 2x2 square (so space for four tiles) somewhat isolated from the rest of the board. Usually we never place tiles in this area, because you can't expand much and you could get trapped up against the walls. But the gate does two things: first, it opens up the area to become bigger and therefore giving you more opportunities, and secondly, you can place a tile against the gate so it encourages placement in this area. In fact, I placed my first tile there and that whole section of the board quickly filled up.

Here are some photos of the board at various stages:








27
The Marketplace / WTS: Mini No5 - Mage and Witch (or other minis)
« on: April 16, 2016, 09:17:18 AM »
Hi all,

It seems a few people (including me) have asked about Mage and Witch recently and it seems like it's becoming increasingly hard to get. I just contacted a local store who said they don't have any in stock right now but can order it. If there is enough interest from people here, I could order a few copies and ship them out. The retail price (excluding shipping) is CHF8.90, which is the equivalent of $9.19 (US dollar), €8.15 (euro) or £6.47 (British pounds), so I would on-sell for the same amount.

I could also order other minis, which would be the same price. In all cases, it will be the French edition.

Let me know if you're interested.

Cheers,
jungleboy

28
Anything Else / Questions about Trees
« on: April 15, 2016, 04:52:29 AM »
Check out this house for rent just outside Carcassonne with a palm tree in the courtyard. Maybe the owners have the School expansion and tried to make it more realistic?!

https://www.ownersdirect.co.uk/accommodation/p8140352


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

29
The Marketplace / Ordering online at Cundco (HiG)
« on: April 12, 2016, 04:44:15 AM »
Cundco is HiG's online shop, and these days mini-expansions are often released directly through Cundco, so it's an important online shop for many Carcassonne fans. We talk about Cundco in various threads, such as the postman threads or the threads for new expansions. But this information can often get lost in multiple threads so perhaps it's time we had a dedicated thread to discuss people's experiences with Cundco. Vote in the poll to share your experience about shopping with Cundco so far, and also use this thread to talk about future orders with Cundco.

Some people have had some negative experiences with Cundco recently. If you've had problems, share them and it might help others to avoid these problems in the future.

Finally, do you have any other general tips or comments to make about shopping with Cundco? Do you pay by bank transfer or by PayPal? Do they typically respond fairly quickly if you send them an email? How could the service be improved?

30
Other Games / Shelfies - My board game collection
« on: March 18, 2016, 08:14:02 AM »
Recently someone suggested this as a topic idea, so here it is: what does your board game collection look like?

I have only recently started to expand beyond Carcassonne so my collection is still quite small (as is my apartment). But funding 7 Kickstarter projects in the last 2 months should change that soon enough!

My two Carcassonne big boxes are at the bottom, with my remaining boxed games on top.



What does your board game collection look like?

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