A Journey Into the World Record of a Game of Carcassonne

[Paul]

Prologue

So how did all start? I can't recall exactly when, but I'm pretty sure it started at CarcassonneCentral as I was acquire duplicates of Carcassonne base games and expansions. These were for making visual arts with the tiles, known as CarcArt. As my collection grew, and the comments about this, I made a simple program in JavaScript to demonstrate how ten thousand tiles would look like, found here. And from there on it was all downhill realising I'm so close to be able to beat the Guinness World Records in the largest game.
  But I didn't stop there. To ensure my top after I'd beat the record, I needed more tiles and thus my collection grew further and further. Realising the slow paste and the cost, I decided to inquiry about getting tiles from it's original source. Much to my surprise, barely 2 weeks later, I get a phone call from a truck driver saying he has a delivery for me! This delivery of over 70 sets of tiles from the base game jumped my tile count very close towards the 10k mark.
 
And so begins the quest for finding a suitable indoor area to play the game...

(Chapter one will be posted on Tuesday March 29th)

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2570.0

[Paul]

Chapter One

It was on October 1st when I received this:



Knowing I'm so close to surpass ten thousand tiles, it was time to search for a place to play it. So where do one go to find a huge area to play? I can't exactly do it outdoors, especially not here in Sweden where the weather is so unpredictable even Nostradamus would've gone "You're on your own on this one."
  I often say "Google is your friend", well, most of the times , so I started searching for local businesses that rents out offices and convention rooms. Sure enough, I found some possible indoor rooms for rent, even the local library that would've been free of charge to book. Since I didn't have 10k tiles yet, I decided to stop searching and have a go at it again when I actually had enough tiles to play the game itself.

Few days later, I was offered a free pass for computer and board gaming / non-gaming job offers convention (bizarre combo, I know!) by my sister. Figure I at least go the first day.
  While there I was introduced to the game Splendor by one of the arrangers. Instant love for the game, I purchased it the very same day, merely few minutes after we left the convention. One of the local game stores was just a stone throw away.
  During a few games of Splendor, which the arranger for this convention booth helped us with the rules and even played a few times with us, conversation arised about board games in general. Naturally the topic of Carcassonne came up and the idea of a world record game followed shortly. He certainly peaked with interest and it was not until my sister showed a picture of my collection to him (image above) he burst out that we should have this game at a convention which he's taking part of arranging next year (2016). So we exchanged mail and that was the end of it.
 
After a few weeks, not getting an answer from him, I was beginning to think that nothing would happen, so I continued to acquire the last few tiles needed and started looking for a place to hold this game on Google again. Found a decent, large enough house for festivities and such. And it was cheap, only about 35 Euro for the weekend (Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, which coindicentally was almost our stay at the convention where we held the actual game).

As time passed, moving swiftly into end of January, I finally got contacted by the arranger we met at the convention last year and then it was official. I was going to hold the game at GothCon this year! The quest to find an indoor area was completed. A new quest to pursuit was at hand: Preparations...

(Chapter two will be posted on Wednesday March 30th)

[Paul]

Chapter Two

So the first thing I did was asking around if anyone can help me with this game. My sister volunteered and our newly acquired friend Robert, whom she went on a short study course with.
  And that was it. All my closest friends and other relatives wouldn't even consider the idea of helping me out when I needed them the most. Not really a shocker. Sadly the life I live in at the moment, where I don't have any real friends or family members that would put aside their own greedy minds and egos to help a friend.
  You see, to them it's all about "What do I gain from this?" or "Shouldn't you focus on something else?" But I digress.
 
Early on, in February, we helt a game test in our living room to check the time and get a feel of the game. I had already decided we'd not be using all the rules, but only a few that were easy to learn and to keep the pace going.
  This involved The Dragon aspect of the expansion and Trader's and Builders, Inns and Cathedrals and The Flyer.
 
After only one game test, we realised this was not going to work. The time frame was too limited and we needed to cut our 1 minute per turn down to 15 seconds a turn. Robert already displeased on the rules, saying how it was hard to keep all this in mind when it's a stressful game. I did promise a spreadsheet with the main rules, figure it would help.

That same day, after the game test, we had a meeting, writing down ideas and planning the event itself.

Much were we bound to the lack of knowledge for I've never been to GothCon, where the game will be held. This sprung a sheet of questions that I was to mail to GothCon asking for details. Sure enough, the next day we got answers to everything we wanted to know.
 
Now that that was taken care of, it was time to do larger game tests. But we needed a bigger table, come to think of it, a bigger room...

(Chapter Three will be posted on Thursday March 31th)

[Paul]

Chapter Three

So, we needed a bigger table for our mini MegaCarc games. One thought that came to mind was the board game clubhouse where Robert is a member of. We contanted them and sure enough, they let us use their conference room which was good enough for some 2000 tiles games.
  We got an access code so we could enter whenever we wanted, giving us full trust to the entire building. Almost.
  Some of the rooms where locked, for example those with shelves of board games. But it's all good. We needed the biggest room only and we could help ourselves to the kitchen's coffee and tea, which was nice.
  First thing that Monday we met up outside the clubhouse at 9 am. Well inside, we set up the room and had our first game with some 1500+ tiles. Game time wasn't that good and if I recall correctly we had the turn per player down to 15 seconds. It's viable but not good enough.
  This same week we did another test and following week 2 more tests each time trying ways to implement the river with new variants. The final game resulted in a decent starter kit involving the Wheel of Fortune tile with four river base and the form on each side. As a rule, the river has to flow away from the center, thus no U-turns were allowed, not even between a straigh river tile.
 
As time grew nearer to the actual convention, we felt we were in pretty good shape with the play turns, down to 8 seconds. Little did we know, the larger the game would grow during the actual 10k game, the harder it would be to keep up this time frame...

(Chapter Four will be posted on Friday, April 1st)

[Paul]

Chapter Four
(posted on Saturday instead of Friday)

Thursday, Mars 24th. The convention (GothCon.se) starts tomorrow. We, that are taking part arranging an event was given access a day earlier from 8 pm to sign in and set up shop.
  I slept fairly well last night. Don't think it hit me yet the thing we're about to succeed with. Most of the stuff I'd planned to bring with me was already packed or on standby. During the day I did the final packing and then hit the shower.



We departed a bit earlier, figure we'd grab a bit to eat down town. My brother drove our sister and me, we'd meet Robert there. He had an X-wing tournament today, which ended just in time for him to join us for dinner. After a few back and forth discussing where to eat, failing miserably, we decided to meet up at the convention first and take it from there.
  Only Robert and I was into getting dinner so we split up, having my brother and sister waiting in the car guarding the stuff while we went to a pizza restaurant nearby.
 
Rejoined at the convetion again, we unloaded everything, taking it to outside of the class room where we were going to hold the game, waiting for one of the employees to come open the door. Convention took place in a school.
  Again, Robert and I departed to go sign in, while my brother and sister stayed to guard the stuff. After much delay, like over an hour, we finally got in to be able to sign up. This delay set our plans back a bit, but nothing to worry about. I did plan for delays and whatnot.
 
That evening, with unpacking taking like 10 minutes, we had our first game session with The River and 720 draw tiles before calling it a night. We had been assigned dorm rooms but decided to sleep in the room instead, which we were not allowed to do, but... shhh! My brother drove my sister home so only the buds stayed (and stayed throughout the entire convention overnight here).
  Sleeping bags on the floor with only a thin mat under, was brutal and I don't think I slept at all that night, but that did not affect the following day, when things finally started to sink in for me, just how insance of a challenge we were up against...

(Chapter Five will be posted on Sunday, April 3rd)

[Paul]

Chapter Five

And so came Friday, Mars 25h. Robert and I were up and about already at 8 am awaiting my sister. Although I barely got any sleep, if any at all, I didn't feel all that fatigued. We chatted a bit and a few minutes into the conversation my sister and brother showed up. We left them to guard the room while Robert and I went for breakfast.
  Breakfast was pretty decent for being arranged by bunch of gamers. Bread, butter, cheese, ham and even warm oatmeal with assorted jam and orange / apple juice. But most importantly, coffee! We each filled a tray with this and that and ventured back to our convention room to eat there while going thru today's agenda.
 
As we were eating, visitors started to show up and we had some sort of an informal speech and answering questions. We also got visited by some of the convention's top dogs not only saying this is such a cool thing that we're doing but they also informed us they found more tables. Yaay!

The day pretty much went on with us playing out more tiles up to about 10 pm when my brother came back to drive my sister home. During the day we had a lot of visitors that engaged us in conversation. It was now that I was beginning to realise how big this convention truly is. After all, it's been around for 40 years, celebreating it's mark this very year!
  We had a lot of fun talking to the visitors and made many new acquintances. Some even came back several times during the day to see the board grow!

Some of the things that caught many the attention was the large area of cloisters in one field, mostly built by Robert:

 
  Later that day, we also got a suggestion to make a huge city figure we should do some crazy things while we're at it. And so we did! We set out to do a city stretching from one corner, to another paralell corner and then continue to a third corner, making it shaped somewhat like an arch or a bow. But halfway thru we got fed up with it and closed the city, ending up scoring 855 points sharing it with every player!

855 points city:
 
As my sister was heading out, Robert and I thought we'd take a break, maybe go to bed, but neither of us felt like winding down. One of the visitors, attending the Carcassonne tournament taking place on Saturday, stayed to talk to us.
  We decided to continue to play a few more boxes of tiles during the night. Half-way thru, Robert realised that the woman chatting with us could pitch in and take over my sister's part of the game, which up until now I was doing. And so we three ended up playing to about 3 am, making up for lost time.
 
Calling it a night, we all went to bed. Robert fell asleep in literally a few seconds. Incredible. I one the other hand, did go to bed but got no sleep at all...

(Chapter Six will be posted next week)

The longest road in the entire game rewarded me (alone) 35 points:


A still shot of Friday's progression:


Fly-by view of Friday's progression:

[Mrsnewl]

  Hi this was amazing. I would love to play such a big game. I try as often as I can to play 'whole hog' as I have coined in my house. It does make sense to limit the elements though.

Thanks for the inspiration.

[Paul]

Hi this was amazing. I would love to play such a big game. I try as often as I can to play 'whole hog' as I have coined in my house. It does make sense to limit the elements though.

Thanks for the inspiration.

Thank you!

I hope I will be able to post the rest of the journey here soon. Falling behind on so much here, which is a bit ironic since time is spend on other board games. Ok, maybe just a little. The summer is just awesome here in Sweden at the moment I just can't sit on a computer all day, whether it's work or not!

[Fritz_Spinne]

The summer is just awesome here in Sweden at the moment I just can't sit on a computer all day, whether it's work or not!

It's time to think about a metal and magnetic version of Carcassonne ...

[kettlefish]

I hope I will be able to post the rest of the journey here soon. Falling behind on so much here, which is a bit ironic since time is spend on other board games. Ok, maybe just a little. The summer is just awesome here in Sweden at the moment I just can't sit on a computer all day, whether it's work or not!

Hi Paul,
the summer is gone - do you have some time to finish your report here?

[Paul]

I hope I will be able to post the rest of the journey here soon. Falling behind on so much here, which is a bit ironic since time is spend on other board games. Ok, maybe just a little. The summer is just awesome here in Sweden at the moment I just can't sit on a computer all day, whether it's work or not!

Hi Paul,
the summer is gone - do you have some time to finish your report here?

Tidbits completed. Got sidetracked again and now it's already December. x_x
  I'll see what I can do next week. I'm going away for the weekend, back in 3 days.

Last week I finished sorting files and documents and now working on a timeline to finish the diary.

[walt_ua]

Chapter One

It was on October 1st when I received this:

Where did you buy these additional tiles? I mean, I reckon you bought blank tile sets from Cundco, but how exactly did you print on them with such great quality?? What printer and settings did you use?

[MrNumbers]

Where did you buy these additional tiles? I mean, I reckon you bought blank tile sets from Cundco, but how exactly did you print on them with such great quality?? What printer and settings did you use?

I doubt he printed these tiles. I think he bought original ones. But Paul will come soon to confirm this.

[danisthirty]

Where did you buy these additional tiles? I mean, I reckon you bought blank tile sets from Cundco, but how exactly did you print on them with such great quality?? What printer and settings did you use?

I doubt he printed these tiles. I think he bought original ones. But Paul will come soon to confirm this.

Yes, I'm pretty sure he said he bought them too. He has also said that he is working on completing this post so I'm sure it will be worth the wait when his next update is ready!

[walt_ua]

Where did you buy these additional tiles? I mean, I reckon you bought blank tile sets from Cundco, but how exactly did you print on them with such great quality?? What printer and settings did you use?

I doubt he printed these tiles. I think he bought original ones. But Paul will come soon to confirm this.

Well, I'd love to buy these sets in old-edition artwork to expand my collection!

But where can I do that??