Round 3: danisthirty vs jungleboy

[danisthirty]

My match against jungleboy was a surprise 2 - 0 victory for me. I say it was a surprise as we've had a couple of trial games previously when the league was still finding its feet and JB won both games fairly convincingly. This evening was a different story though...

The first game was slightly lower-scoring than the second. I drew first blood with a small city but apart from a cloister I had, the main feature of interest was a long and winding road which JB successfully stole from me with two meeples against my one.

Unusually (for me) I was the first to lay claim to the main farm while JB began building a large city. I took this as an opportunity to steer his as yet incomplete road towards his city such that it trapped his 2 meeples on the road whilst simultaneously making it more difficult for him to get his recently-placed farmer onto the farm I'd already claimed. Maybe he felt differently, but this put him at a major disadvantage as far as I was concerned, and as long as he didn't complete the road I was fairly sure that I could out-compete him for the farm.

By halfway I was leading by 27 points after completing a cloister and 4 small cities. A few tiles later I increased this lead to 40 points after completing another cloister and a small city with the same tile.

The game changed a lot over the next dozen or so tiles as JB successfully got his farmer onto the field so I responded by getting a second farmer of my own onto it to regain control. I then completed another cloister and a couple of short roads while JB shifted his emphasis to winning back his increasingly large city, and scored a separate 14-point city as a welcome bonus too.

With 7 or 8 tiles left "in the bag" (so to speak) JB hadn't been able to do anything to chip away at the sizeable lead I'd built up and I also had control of the main farm by three farmers to one. JB had a further two knights stuck in an uncompletable city, two on an uncompletable road and 1 in an uncompleteable cloister. I wasn't going to win any significant points from any of the other three non-farmer meeples I had down but I was able to use the one I had left in hand to take a couple of roads before farming on a separate farm serving two cities.

In the final scoring, JB took 12 points for his road plus 14 points for his city (plus 5 points for another city) and 8 points for his cloister. My two farms won me 24 points between them plus 4 points for an incomplete city. Unfortunately for JB though, his impressive finish wasn't enough to overcome the lead I already had and the final scores settled on 107 - 72.

All credit to JB for an excellent game; it felt a lot more competitive than I've (unintentionally) made it sound here and was very tight at times. The second felt even closer but that's been left for JB to write-up so I won't say any more for now other to drop in a couple of screenshots:








Over to you Nick!

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=813.0

[jungleboy]

The first game did indeed feel quite uncompetitive from my perspective. I fell far behind quite early and didn't have the meeples to catch up. The second game was better but I'm still unhappy with my level of play in the League so far. Strategy-wise, I seem to just make it up as I go. Meanwhile Dan has managed to perfect the elusive combination of keeping his score ticking over during the game AND setting himself up for end game scoring (with farms).

In the second game, Dan came out aggressively by placing two meeples near the city I had begun with my first tile. I decided the city wasn't big enough to bother fighting for and eventually he won it for 14 points. This set the tone for the game as Dan outscored me by 37 points on cities, mostly through smaller cities. I outscored him on all other features combined, so cities proved to be the big difference in the game.

I placed the first farmer in what turned out to be the main field and I always felt I was in control of this farm, since I was the first to get two farmers in it and the first to get three farmers in it. But Dan was always close behind and kept tying it up. I thought I had cleverly blocked on of his farmers from getting into the field but he managed to expand the landscape in a different direction and join his farmer to the field that way instead.

As the game progressed, Dan scored well on cities and roads and by the second half of the game his lead was out to about 30 points. With the farm also set to be worth about that much, and with me having some unfinished features that would help in end-game scoring, I still thought that I could win if I captured the farm outright (unlike the first game where I was behind in in-game scoring and in the farm race). I placed a fourth meeple near the farm at the top of the board but Dan managed to block it from joining the main farm (a combination of skill and luck!). With three tiles to play, I made one last attempt at putting a fourth meeple in the farm. On my last tile I needed to pull a curved road (RRFF) but got a straight road instead (FRFR) which ended my chances.

In the end Dan won 138-105, a 33-point victory with the big farm worth 30 points. So winning the farm would not quite have been enough anyway. Well done to Dan and now I have some soul-searching to do before my next match.

[danisthirty]

Thanks for the write-up JB, I hope you weren't too demoralised. Although I won on this occasion, I'd still say that we're pretty much equal although I seemed to have the tiles on my side for these two games! This said, I think you could easily have won the second game if you'd managed to permanently trap the 3 meeples that I had stuck for most of it. I've written a little about this below:

I really struggled to get into the second game as I was 3 meeples down for the majority of it. I got all 3 back with 27 tiles to go when I drew a cccf tile which is what I needed to win the small city JB mentioned and complete an adjacent cloister for 23 points in total (see below). The points were nice, but it was the meeples I needed as I simply couldn't have competed for the farm without them.



In some ways it was bad luck that I had to wait for so long for the right tile to come along and rescue my meeples, but I was a little surprised that JB didn't try to make this more difficult for me by limiting my options as it didn't matter whether I drew a cccf or a cccr tile to complete the city. If it had been the other way around I would have tried to have closed it down such that JB needed the cccc tile to fill the gap. I don't think this would have been difficult and there was certainly plenty of time to do it.

Hope this helps with the soul-searching!

[jungleboy]

I was trying to make it more difficult for you to complete this city at one point. My plan was to put a city piece on the fourth edge so that you would need the one CCCC tile to complete it (giving you only 50% chance, though it turned out that you did draw this tile in the end). But now I can't remember why I abandoned this plan; perhaps I just forgot about it!

[danisthirty]

It seemed as though this was what you were planning on doing when you placed the ccff tile diagonally south-east of where the tile I needed was, but you didn't follow this up with a tile above this which would have limited what tile I could play to close the city/ complete my cloister.

Blocking/ trapping my opponents' meeples is always a high priority for me, as you saw in our first game!