Wheel of Fortune & Mage & Witch: Element Match-Ups #4

[Whaleyland]

Element Match-Ups is a new series of weekly challenges for all members of CarcassonneCentral. Each week, an element from a large expansion will be matched up with an element from a small expansion. Your job: try it out and let everybody know what you think about the pair. Consider this a quasi-scientific survey in that you are only playing with these two elements and the base game — nothing else! Otherwise the results will be skewed. You have a week to try the match-up from the time the match is announced until the next match is announced (which usually occurs sometime between Friday and Saturday, depending on time zone).

This week our elements are WHEEL OF FORTUNE and MAGE & WITCH (Carcassonne Mini #5). Wheel of Fortune gives players the opportunity to gamble a little while a wheel mechanism "spins" around randomly granting players bonuses or penalties. The Mage, meanwhile, adds points to features while the Witch subtracts points. Will these expansions interact well together? Will they interact at all? I guess we'll see...

The elements are set, the challenge is issued, and now it is for you to decide whether these elements work well together or are terrible companions. Summarise your experience below in however much detail you wish, and feel free to share any strategic advice you have for other players taking the challenge.

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2115.0

[Whaleyland]

Well nobody has chimed in with responses to this, which is unfortunate since I made sure to include two expansions again that should be fully playable on JCZ. Nonetheless, I have played this pair through a 2-player game and found them so non-interactory that I ended up adding a new answer option to the poll! I'll be sure to add this option to future and previous polls as well, in case you find that the elements/expansions don't interact at all.

In any case, I forgot that Wheel of Fortune AND Mage & Witch don't scale especially well to 2-players. The Wheel really thrives when it's hard to claim points on the board so you're willing to take a gamble elsewhere. That being said, we did both gamble a few times, with me getting one meeple stuck on the Wheel at game end, but nothing really significant came from the gambling. It was usually only done in those rare turns where there are still a lot of meeples in the supply and nothing much to do on the board. Mage & Witch also doesn't work well with so few players because they really rely on the "take-that" mechanic of the Witch to counter the "Yes please!" bonus of the Mage. For the first six M&W tile draws, only the Mage was moved. For the seventh, I decided to be mean and I moved the Witch onto my opponent's Road. She ended up leaving it there and taking the Mage when she drew the last M&W tile because she could make a small fortune on a City she had just completed with said tile. It was a smart move that only lost her three points (from the Witch) but gained her around 6 points (from the Mage bonus). We were a bit disappointed to find that neither element really impacted in any significant way on the other and the Wheel really divided the board between us. Only a few times did we cross over the Wheel to claim a feature or disrupt an opponent's feature. Most of the game we stuck to our own sides.

Anybody else give this combination a go?

[Halfling]

Hi Whaleyland, I play the Wheel of Fortune a lot and I like the fact that you have to work hard to combine farms.  All too often with the start tile there is a dominant farm etc.
So I would pair WOF with the bridges from the 8th major expansion if you wanted to give everyone the chance to amalgamate farms to their advantage.
As for the Witch and Mage, I love their concept but with only 8 tiles it is rare that features are scored more than twice in a game, especially as I avoid trying to complete a feature with the witch in it in the hope that I can shift her first.  It is fun to complete an opponents city/road and get them half points which leads me to suggest pairing the Witch and the Mage with the Count, King and Robber as it gives an ideal opportunity to place a meeple in the city. 

[Hounk]

Well nobody has chimed in with responses to this, which is unfortunate since I made sure to include two expansions again that should be fully playable on JCZ.

Not quite, since WoF is not yet included in JCZ.