3 Player with Animal Farm, Detours & Deadends and By Order of the King

[Carcking]

The Detours and Deadends is the same as Farm Gates. I struggle with what to call it but I made up tiles with a road construction type barrier with a detour sign and an arrow on the barricade. The mechanic is the same regardless the name.

Because one or two of the detours end up being dead ends we found that the farm grew very large. The board was practically one large farm. We played with Farmer in the Dell rules however which kept the farm from being unbalancing at game end. We used the same mechanic for Detours as that of Ferries. That is, you place the tile, move wood, then place the ferry/detour section. The result is different than that of Ferries though. In Ferries you can place a follower on one of the roads then instantly join to another player's road by placing the ferry section. In Detours though you cannot place a follower on the farm because it is occupied the minute you place the tile (presuming your placing it on an already occupied farm). So you don't instantly join to a farm with one of your followers, it's more of a two step process.

We actually got quite a few By Order of the King cards completed. That was fun.

Animal Farm was also very fun. There was a lot of play with the many tokens out. Even the Feoffer got drawn.

Here's what was included:
Inns & Cathedrals
Cathars & Siege
Magic Gates
Abbeys
Bridges
By Order of the King
Animal Farm
Detours & Deadends
Farmer in the Dell
Pig Herd tiles (2)
Wagon
Pig
Mayor
Alternate Start Tiles

In the end Orange took the win by 5 points - what a close game!

                  

Final score:   


Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=247.0

[Big Guy]

How many of the total animal farm tokens were drawn throughout the game? More than half? And did the the foxes and wolves always have stuff to chase off in that huge field?

I cant wait to have some more play sessions. And ANIMAL FARM and BOOTK sound like a blast.

[Carcking]

I would say about half of the Animal Farm tokens were drawn - maybe just under. My desire is to have more than half of them drawn.

When I first wrote the rules I said that only the houses that also have an animal pen (fence) attached could trigger the drawing of a token. That is the way the above game was played. I have since changed it to any/all houses in fields trigger it so there are more tokens drawn. That adds 5 more tokens to the basic game, plus 6 if you play with Inns & Cathedrals. There are other expansions that add a few also. I have added some homesteads to some of my homemade tiles too.

The wolves had plenty to do. They actually chased off a T&B pig on two occasions when they were drawn while there were no sheep on the farm.

We like BOOTK. It's one of my wife's favorites and she typically does well with it. It didn't serve her well in this game though as most of the cards went to my brother and I. I think she only got one card completed.