5-game day including Carcassonne: the City and Ark of the Covenant

[jungleboy]

I just came back from playing 5 games with two friends, it was a fun day! We played:

Carcassonne: the City
Catan (Nuremberg edition but we just played the standard part because Catan was new to two of us)
The Little Prince
Risk
Ark of the Covenant

I won two of the five (the City and the Little Prince) so I did pretty well. I'll detail the two spin-off games here:

Carcassonne: the City

This was the third time I had played this game and the first time with more than two players. I continue to be impressed with this game and I thought it worked well with three players, especially the wall building. It was very close throughout the game with the final score being 112 (green) - 105 (yellow) - 95 (blue).

I (green) lost the battle for the main residential area but in the end this wasn't quite as lucrative as we thought as it was only worth 18 points. I was able to grab two smaller residential areas late in the game that together were worth 20 points, which was probably the key to my victory. I also played the wall better than my opponents by completing their small features to initiate wall building. I was the only one who used all four tower pieces for extra points, while the guy who came last didn't use any of his. I missed out on an opportunity to place a guard on top of the city gate but luckily this didn't come back to haunt me.

Ark of the Covenant

This was also the third time I had played this and the first time with more than two players. Unfortunately I came last with the final scores being 122 (yellow) - 113 (red) - 91 (green).

This game was fairly even for the first half of the game but then two things happened that worked very much against me: first, in the battle for the city at the top right of the screen that red and I both had our prophets in, red placed a tile to make it impossible to complete (requiring a CCCC tile which was already out). Then yellow closed his prophet city for 40 points, with red also scoring 20. This put me more than 50 points behind so I knew I probably couldn't win. I finished the second largest city to edge a bit closer but it wasn't enough. Red eventually joined the biggest field that had been started by yellow and I couldn't join it. This was our last game of the day and it was yellow's (Matt's) only win of the day so it was nice that he finished with a win.

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2173.0