First game of (kinda) Mega Carcassonne

[carca82]

Me  and my sister  have been playing Carcassonne together since last christmas and most of my games are against her. We like to keep track of our games so we have a sheet where we register scores, dates and which expansions we're using for each game (attached file). We realized our 100th game was close so we decided to organize a game of Mega Carcassonne to celebrate the event...

...then we realized that a true game of Mega Carcassonne was a little too much for us, so we designed a custom game (we call it CarcassOneHundred... yeah, I know) that we think it could be really fun to play. Its content (all C1):

• 1x River I + 1x River II (except the source tile) + Source river tile from Games Quarterly #11
• 2x Base Game + BB5 Wheel of Fortune Base Game
• 3x Inns & Cathedrals + 3x Traders & Builders
• 1x Princess & Dragon
• 1x Tower
• 1x Abbey & Mayor (base tiles + 2 abbey tiles each)
• 1x Count, King and Robber (only base tiles + king & robber, no Count nor City of carcassonne)
• 1x Wheel of Fortune (base tiles + Wheel of Fortune itself)
• 1x Hills & Sheeps
• 1x Catapult
• 1x Flying Machines + Goldmines + Crop circles

Of course we will use some house rules (i.e. more cathedrals/inns in the same city/road will score you more points if you close them, but you will lose points if you don't, a different score method for goods, more meeples involved...). The game will be split into two parts: the first one is just the preparation (setting all the game elements up, placing the starting tiles and placing the rivers) and will likely happen lately today, while the game itself will require an entire weekend fully dedicated to it.

If you're interested - for any reason - on how it goes... stay tuned! We'll update the thread accordingly 

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=6103.0

[DIN0]

If you like keeping track of yor games, perhaps you would be interested in Carcassonne Game Notation
https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=5644.0

Currently it supports base game only, but if you care for a quick highly competitive game (tournament style), then you recording your games would help you improve your play 

An expanded notation for all the expansions is in the works as well.

[kothmann]

+1 merit just for the spreadsheet!  Wow!

This looks like a lot of fun.  Please share photos, not just of the final landscape but also of exciting moments / lucky draws, etc!

[Decar]

Wonderful post Sir Lose-a-Farm - I can't wait to see the photographs of the game!

Thanks for sharing!  Good luck!

[carca82]

All the tiles were shuffled up into 4 different bags, and we completed the preparation: starting tiles and rivers are now in place! Let's go!

[Bumsakalaka]

I like that start setup.

[kothmann]

Let's go!

Still playing?   

[carca82]

Still playing?   

We have to even start yet 

[carca82]

We finally started playing  After a couple hours the table looked like this:



Some things we noticed:

• We added too many meeples and special features. Since there were a lot of tiles involved we thought it was a good idea to add some more but this backfired on us: there are too many of them, removing that sense of risk that often makes a game more interesting. Even small things - like two abbey tiles instead of one - felt wrong: there's almost no sense of sacrifice, ever.
• (Two dragons would have made sense though).
• We probably won't use all of the tiles. The table is already half full and we used maybe 1/3 of the tiles.
• An only 50-points scoreboard is a pain in the a** in a game of Mega-Carcassonne 
• After almost 1 year of playing together, we yet have to master the rules of the game, or better, the complexity of the interaction among many expansions obviously not created to be mixed together  We have A LOT of doubts and I'll start a dedicated thread when the game is over

[Bumsakalaka]

Welcome in Mage-Carcassonne players family.


Some expansions in mega carcassonne as loosing it's power or are useless when you have a lot of meeples.


Some of destructive expansions like Tower / Dragon help you to save meeples, so then you have more meeple as you thought, because some of blocked meeples can be rescued.


It is good to play a lot of combinations in Mega Carcassonne and you find your "golden selection" which will be fine for both of you.


I see, you are playing C1, so try to play German Monasteries eventualy Dutch monasteries. Very powerfull in Mega Carcassonne, and then you will not have enough meeples


Keep playing and enjoy game

[carca82]

try to play German Monasteries eventualy Dutch monasteries. Very powerfull in Mega Carcassonne, and then you will not have enough meeples

Very good idea, German + Dutch + Japanese could easily decimate even the biggest supply 

[kothmann]

Great photo!

I’m interested in farm tactics: are both players trying to play farmer + pig and then join then Green barn (for 12 points as it now has 6 cities)?  Pink has two great farms (both have 7 cities): are they racing to lock those down?  Only 1 other Green farmer?

Any other interesting tactics?

Looking forward to more photos…

Have fun!

[carca82]

I’m interested in farm tactics: are both players trying to play farmer + pig and then join then Green barn (for 12 points as it now has 6 cities)?  Pink has two great farms (both have 7 cities): are they racing to lock those down?  Only 1 other Green farmer?

Thank you for the interested question! Alas, my only answer will be... we made a huge mess  Suddenly we realized we both connected one more field to the green barned field without noticing, and panic ensued:



We were able to almost pinpoint the moments when both of our mistakes happened and we reached a settlement. Regretfully, any chance of tactics died that very moment 

Tomorrow I will post more photos, curiosities, oddities... and questions, of course

[Scott]

An only 50-points scoreboard is a pain in the a** in a game of Mega-Carcassonne

This is why 100-point score tracks have been made. Replace the scoring meeples with regular d10 and  you can track up to 999 points. Add percentile d10 and you can track up to 9999.


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[carca82]

I take back what I said about having added too many meeples to the players' stashes. When the game peaked, the extra figures felt right. Should I repeat the experience I just woudln't add the second big meeple. Also, we used all the tiles! A grandtotal of ~530 tiles on the table. Good job, table! Some curiosities:

One of the biggiest cities I've ever seen:

24 tiles, 6 shields, 2 cathedrals and a total of 120 points for pink under house rules (every cathedral adds +1 to every tile and shield of a completed city). I was baffled. But then...

...pink did it again, like, only a couple of hours later:

30 tiles, 4 shields, 2 cathedral for a total of 136 points under the same house rule.

For reference, here's the only case where the equivalent house rule was applied on a road:

This road was worth 9 points because every inn adds +1 to every tile forming a road.

Counting the king & robber points was really interesting. We used meeples of another color to mark elements on the map and these were the result (~85 completed cities and ~110 completed roads):
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Final score:

	Green	Pink
Points	909	1005
Goods	80	-
Gold	40	12
Roads (including Robber points)	113	5
Cities (including King points)	8	87
Monasteries	8	24
Fields	200	119
TOTAL	1358	1252

Pink got those two giant cities but in the end they were voided by the giant barned green field. Also, green won all three products and those alone were worth 80 points under house rules (owner of the majority of a good type wins 15 points + 1 point for every good they own):


In the end it was a lot of fun and my biggest fear (losing too much time trying to figure out inter-expansion rules) didn't translate into an actual thing. We had to pause the game sometimes to search for a solution (and we made a little bit of a mess with fields  ) but it was a smooth ride. A smooth, fun, 13 hours-long ride