The Date - 9 August 2013
Play time - 6 hours
Tiles - 245 after school and river
The base set
- Wheel of Fortune tiles only, no wheel
The start tiles
The expansions
- Inns & Cathedrals
- Traders & Builders
- King & Robber Baron
- The Princess & the Dragon
- The Tower
- Abbey & Mayor
- Bridges, Castles, & Bazaars
- The Flier (Mini 1)
- The Ferries (Mini 3)
- The Goldmines (Mini 4)
- Mage and Witch (Mini 5)
- Crop Circles II (Mini 7)
- + 6 tiles from Catapult expansion
House Rules
- "Weaker King & Robber" arbitrary final scoring value of 15 points each, and a total of 40 points if both obtained
- "Double dragon" two dragons in play
- "No surprises" reducing the beginning reach of towers by one space.
- "First choice, last placement" our simplified houserule for Bazaars. Upon drawing a Bazaar and playing it as a normal tile, as many tiles as there are people are drawn face up. Beginning from the active player and then in clockwise fashion tiles are chosen, but are placed in reverse order. Meaning the player who got the last choice gets to place first
The omitted
- The Count - we enjoy the Count, but it just added one layer of turn-order complexity that we didn't feel like we could get our heads around at this point.
- The Robbers & The Messages - to put it simply we don't like scoreboard clutter. Next time, however, I think we will include the Messages but without the female meeple.
- The Catapult - we will never use it in MegaCarc
- The Wheel - we didn't want to tip the "luck" scale any further
- The Phantom - we will include it next time
Highlights - the stuff that we all thought worked great
- The school - it was the first time playing this for all of us. We enjoyed the mechanism so much that we all agreed that the teacher effect would be great if it lasted more than just at the start of the game (with the 6 roads). We have a houserule to remedy that for next time
- The bazaars - the usually disliked bazaars were enjoyed by all (well maybe most). It caused a couple of instances where players were sure they'd chosen the best tile only to find out that someone else had sabotaged their placement with a "useless" tile.
- The mage and witch - great dynamic for the cities being hotly contested. Players often shifted their focus depending on whether a mage or witch was or wasn't present. It was also fun as you could "hurt" two players in one go, if you placed the witch on a big city two opponents were sharing.
The Fizzers - the elements that didn't really shine
- the ferries - normally one of our favorites, the ferries had minimal effect in this game.
- the dragons - though there were two of them, their carnage was limited to the first 40-50 tiles of the game. After that they rarely travelled anywhere of interest. Our houserule needs to be altered to force one dragon to move the full 6 spaces instead of allowing for switching between the two.
The Scores
Wolffy started out with the lead for the 1st first third of the game
My Dad then lead for the 2nd third of the game
Darchie and Trev surged forward after scoring a 70+ point city and fought over the lead spot for the remainder of the game.
I, myself, was rather surprised that upon final scoring I had just barely nudged into the lead.
Me 301
Trev 298
Darch 259
Wolffy 222
My Dad 218
The clincher
Though I had tried to get into the 70+ point city to no avail, I decided to finish it with my abbey, to gain the resources and the "King". I didn't realize it, but it would be that move that won me the game. I honestly didn't think they would be enough with Trev set to score big points from his huge farm with barn and pig.
The stuff-up
Trev realised that during the game he paid 3 points to ransom his meeple off of another player. He never utilized that meeple, so had he not ransomed the player he would have tied for the win at the end of the game.
The final verdict
We all agreed it was the most fun and interesting game of Carc we'd played to date, though it was the longest and most complex. If we didn't have the Annotated Rules there's no way we'd have got through it.