Carcassonne Afternoon

[jungleboy]

Because I am (mostly) off work this week, I was able to have a Carcassonne afternoon with my usual playing partner today. We played four games (including three spin-offs), and unfortunately I lost them all! Still, it was a fun afternoon and it sure beats working

Here are the games we played:

‘Mega’ Winter Edition
(The Winter Edition plus the 12 extra tiles with house rules for the animals, plus the Gingerbread Man, plus the Crop Circles and the Phantom.)

This was probably the best and closest game of the day. The house rule for the Basselope was particularly brutal as it meant that by far the biggest farm didn’t score any points. Because of poor shuffling, the Gingerbread Man tiles all came out early and the Crop Circle tiles all came out towards the end. In the end the difference was that my opponent completed two 6-tile cities with the Gingerbread Man in them towards the end of the game, one of them through clever use of the removal aspect of the Crop Circles. This was just enough to offset my two small farms.



Carcassonne: the Castle

This is one of our favourite spin-offs and it was the first time we had played it for a while. But to be honest, my partner is much better at the nuances of the Castle than I am. She almost always gets the biggest keep and always gets more wall tiles than me. I had a good courtyard with six markets going for a while but she managed to join it to end my chances. In the end it wasn’t close and I lost by over 60 points (103-41). It was the first time anyone had completed a full circuit of the walls in the games we’ve played. 



Carcassonne: the City

Usually I prove to be better at the nuances of the City than she does, but this time she won by about 30 points. She scored more from the wall towers and more from the wall guards. My advantage in residential areas wasn’t big enough (owing to larger - and therefore fewer - markets - and I didn’t ‘control’ the wall building as well as I usually do. I placed more wall guards than usual which, combined with my stewards meant I didn’t have many followers left to score with and therefore start wall building.

(I forgot to take a photo until after final scoring.)



Carcassonne
(The Tower + Bridges, Castles and Bazaars)

I thought this would be a fun 3D game (including the Basically Wooden castles, as well as bridges and towers). This was only the second time I had ever played with CB&B in ‘real life’ and I still struggle to incorporate the new elements into my strategy planning, especially the bridges (we only used 2/8 bridges and 1/8 castles between us). It was a fun game, but in the end the difference was the major farm which was worth 46 points. I tried to glom onto it through normal means and bridges but my opponent did well at blocking these attempts with towers or with clever placement, and also did well at making her own farmers immune to the tower. If I could have managed to share the farm it would have been extremely close.




Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2263.0

[Decar]

A great day of Carcassonne!  You managed to play more games than we did at the UK Meetup

Thanks for sharing photos - looks to be a good holiday!

[jungleboy]

A great day of Carcassonne!  You managed to play more games than we did at the UK Meetup

With only two people you can obviously fit in more games, but I also prefer to play several smaller games rather than one game of mega Carc anyway. So we almost always play at least three games when we get together. If it's regular Carcassonne, we always change up the expansions for each game and never have more than about 120 tiles. But lately we have been playing the spin-offs more often to vary each game even more.

[danisthirty]

I'm very jealous, it looks like you had a wonderful afternoon.

Great write-ups and photos. Merit for your efforts