Author Topic: Winter Edition Solitaire (can you beat 82?) (Read 13200 times)

jungleboy · « **on:** October 11, 2014, 02:03:32 PM »

I had some time to spare tonight so I took out the Winter Edition and played some solitaire. The rules come from a thread over at BGG and are quite simple: play 20 tiles plus the start tile, and using only four meeples, try to score as many points as you can. I played eight games with a high score of 72 and a low score of 52.

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=1126.0

SRBO · « **Reply #1 on:** October 14, 2014, 08:49:16 AM »

Lets put up a competition. Im going to try with the base game

Guy · « **Reply #2 on:** October 14, 2014, 08:56:16 AM »

I'm up for that, basic game 20 tiles plus start with four meeples. I can imagine the best scores will be from multiple farms with small cities.

Guy

SRBO · « **Reply #3 on:** October 14, 2014, 08:57:58 AM »

Quote from: gmartinscott on October 14, 2014, 08:56:16 AM

I'm up for that, basic game 20 tiles plus start with four meeples. I can imagine the best scores will be from multiple farms with small cities.

Guy

Lets find it out.
Post the picture and you can have multiple trys.

jungleboy · « **Reply #4 on:** October 14, 2014, 09:29:33 AM »

My biggest farm was worth 12 points (from memory). Another very useful piece is the cloister with road because it basically means that one farmer will feed virtually all cities on the board, on either side of the road on the start tile.

Fritz_Spinne · « **Reply #5 on:** October 14, 2014, 02:34:37 PM »

Why not try to make a chain of cities so you can score them in two fields?

jungleboy · « **Reply #6 on:** October 14, 2014, 02:43:33 PM »

Nice idea but quite difficult with only 20 tiles!

SRBO · « **Reply #7 on:** October 14, 2014, 02:58:53 PM »

Well i tried a few times.. really have a problem with meeplemanagement

Took them a little to fast so its a little blurry and i wasnt very good in counting so i had to redo that! xd

Seems to me that the bad luck is in the big citys.. and indeed the cloister with road is very powerfull

jungleboy · « **Reply #8 on:** October 15, 2014, 05:42:37 AM »

I played again today and was less successful, with scores ranging from 35 to 66. But I must reiterate that the winter tiles are beautiful and I always enjoy playing with them.

Game 1 - 52 points

Unfortunately I had to discard the CCCC tile early on which wasn't a good start. I managed to complete three cities and lay two farmers.

Game 2 - 35 points

I drew the two cloister-road tiles on my second and third turns. I decided to gamble and put monks on both of them. I finished one but not the other, and this was my worst score so far (my only score under 50 in 12 games). Completing my city would have made it respectable.

Game 3 - 53 points

I drew one of my favourite tiles, the CCCC tile with four different cities, and chose to play the farmer in the middle, who ended up being worth 9 points. But my main city got too big and was impossible to finish with only 20 tiles.

Game 4 - 66 points

This was my best game of the day. I closed four cities and with about five tiles left I had all my meeples back. This allowed me to strategically place four farmers in four different farms for a total of 21 farm points.

Guy · « **Reply #9 on:** October 15, 2014, 07:10:31 AM »

Late farming. An excellent technique of you've got the meeple! Haven't had a chance to try this out yet but will post as soon as I do.

Guy

jungleboy · « **Reply #10 on:** October 15, 2014, 12:48:07 PM »

Tonight's best score was 70. I managed to complete five cities and claimed a farm that supplied them all, thanks to a road-cloister tile.

jungleboy · « **Reply #11 on:** October 17, 2014, 12:49:23 PM »

Tonight I scored a personal best of 82. The key is definitely to try to close small cities and then supply as many of these as possible with multiple farms. If I had drawn the CCCC four-city tile earlier (it was the second last tile), I could have scored even more.

SRBO · « **Reply #12 on:** October 17, 2014, 02:15:12 PM »

you also have to be very lucky on the tiles.. haha

jungleboy · « **Reply #13 on:** October 18, 2014, 01:55:32 AM »

Quote from: SRBO on October 17, 2014, 02:15:12 PM

you also have to be very lucky on the tiles.. haha

Yes of course. But you can play four games with one winter set so you have a few chances to get a good group of tiles. In last night's games, the first group of tiles contained a lot of large city pieces so I was able to complete a 26-point city but this obviously wasn't good for farming. Another group had a lot of road pieces so I didn't score very well. And the 82-point group had a lot of single-edge city pieces so it was perfect.

Fritz_Spinne · « **Reply #14 on:** October 18, 2014, 02:30:58 AM »

I think it would be better to play 4 games with 21 tiles each. Using all tiles of one game reduces luck of drawing and only all points together is the result.