The King & Robber Baron – Element of the Week #5

[Guesclin]

Here is a photo of the markers I use to keep track of the size (number of tiles) of the largest city/ longest road:



Whenever anyone closes a city or road we check the size of it against the current position of the relevant marker on the score track in order to determine if the King/ Robber Baron tile needs to change hands. It also makes it easier to see what you need to aim for if you want to win either of these from their current owner...

Obviously this doesn't help with counting the number of completed cities/ roads, but this is made easier by placing some sort of marker (meeples work well for this) on every complete city/ road on the board and then counting them all up as you collect them afterwards...

I actually use those figures instead of tiles cause woodwork just maken people more prone to want it. But good idea for The counting

[Vital Pluymers]

We always play all games like they were meant to be, so in this case 1 point per city or street at the end.

We quite like this small expansion and often it made a difference between winning or losing the game at the end. On the other hand, not having the King or Robber can also be beneficial as your opponents owning the bonus cards are so focussed on protecting them that they "forget" the rest of the game. Sometimes they are even helping the other one by closing their cities and streets early in order to protect their bonus cards ...

We keep track of the biggest city or longest road on the scorecard by using a builder and follower of a not used colour. At the end of the game, counting is fairly easy if you use the meeples, gold bars, etc. to mark each individual city or street...

[JT Atomico]

I do something similar to danisthirty to track the longest road, largest city, etc. See this post: http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=331.msg2834

[danisthirty]

Rosco and I played a game over JCloisterZone last week. It wasn’t huge but we included Inns & Cathedrals, Traders & Builders, Abbey & Mayor, King & Robber Baron and The Phantom. I forget what the final scores were exactly but it was fairly high-scoring with both of us reaching around the 450 mark +/- 20 points.

I lost our game by 30ish points (despite scoring a total of more than 200 for farms alone!) but could have turned this round if I’d managed to get either the King or Robber Baron tiles back before the end of the game as they were worth more than 50 points between them. So in this case they made a huge difference, but I wasn’t paying attention to them and ultimately lost the game because of it.

My advice is to never underestimate how valuable these can end up being!

(PS - having just read the other post that you linked to, I'd just like to point out that I always read Carcking's name as Carckling up until quite recently  )

[eddebaby]

I do something similar to danisthirty to track the longest road, largest city, etc. See this post: http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=331.msg2834

That's the system I use, thanks for the awesome idea JT Although I intend to switch to brown and white colours if I get Big Box 5 (due to it including purple player pieces)

[MrNumbers]

I'd just like to point out that I always read Carcking's name as Carckling up until quite recently  )

But I don't know till the moment: is it a verb (doING something) or a noun (CarcKing)  )

[JT Atomico]

(PS - having just read the other post that you linked to, I'd just like to point out that I always read Carcking's name as Carckling up until quite recently  )

I had always read your name as danisthirsty until very recently

[SRBO]

Here is a photo of the markers I use to keep track of the size (number of tiles) of the largest city/ longest road:



Whenever anyone closes a city or road we check the size of it against the current position of the relevant marker on the score track in order to determine if the King/ Robber Baron tile needs to change hands. It also makes it easier to see what you need to aim for if you want to win either of these from their current owner...

Obviously this doesn't help with counting the number of completed cities/ roads, but this is made easier by placing some sort of marker (meeples work well for this) on every complete city/ road on the board and then counting them all up as you collect them afterwards...

How did you get these:o?

[danisthirty]

Meeplesource.

The king is here: http://www.meeplesource.com/proddetail.php?prod=King-1

The other guy is their “Outlaw” but I can’t find him on their site at the moment so maybe he’s discontinued. In any case, there should be a whole load of new characters available within the next 2 weeks or so (possibly longer – they’re currently in the process of fulfilling a huge KickStarter project - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1303699463/character-meeples) and this should include a “Robber” meeple who will be replacing my Outlaw in any case...

[Christopher]

I have a very much love/hate relationship with the expansion. I think the concept is great, but it becomes very troublesome in execution.

In small games, I think it works reasonably well as the point bonus is nice but not huge. I find that players tend to not worry too much about it and it just goes to whoever happened to complete the biggest features.

In large games, I find it creates very aggressive play! Because the King/Robber goes to the player who completes the biggest/longest city/road, I find that players are constantly finishing each others features to prevent one another from overtaking them. Or, you finally build a feature that will earn you the King/Robber and someone else finishes it! Given that in large games we usually have the Count as well, the completing player gets a follower in Carcassonne, so there's no downside for them. In a large game, the points given at the end can be very big, which leads to problems by itself. We tried giving one point each time a feature was completed to the person currently holding the tile, but this just made people fight over it even more! Eventually, we tried giving the King/Robber to the player who OWNS the biggest/longest completed city/road. This made players focus on building large features of their own instead of squashing everyone else's. I thought this worked very well. I know the 'player who completes' instead of 'player who owns' is nice, but we still have trade tokens for that. Coupling player owns the feature getting the tile with one point given each time a feature is completed to the current holder balances this expansion out nicely. No ruthlessly aggressive play, no giant game-breaking bonus at the end, but opportunity for everyone to get a reasonable number of points from it.

As for keeping track, I also use figures on the scoreboard to mark the biggest and longest features. A couple of times I tried to move two separate markers along one place every time a city/road was completed, thus keeping track of what the bonus points will be and also saving counting them all up at the end, but I kept forgetting to move them or would fail to notice when a tiny road which wasn't owned was completed. In the end, I gave up and we just place followers/wood/etc on the board at the end on each city/road them count them as we remove them.

[dirk2112]

I may have dismissed this expansion a while back as being more trouble than it was worth.   We have used it a couple of times and we score it last (using a napkin because we are cavemen).  It has yet to win the game for anyone, but it does seem to create a lot more interesting play than the trade goods.   We had one game where my son had the Robber Baron with a max length of 9.  He closed off any of my roads or my wife's when our road lengths got to 7.  I'm not sure it was a good strategy, but he kept that tile.   The king was almost always gained by completing someone else's city.  We played this with the Princess and Dragon and based on the tiles there, the King was worth 2x the Robber Baron in most of our games.   I imagine it would have been more balanced if we chose to play with a road heavy expansion like the Flyers. 

[thodekey]

Nice figures, Thirsty Dan! 

We write the size of the longest road or biggest city on a piece of paper but this is much nicer!