Playing "quicker" games

[PapaGeek]

We just added 15 more fan expansion tiles to our standard 4 player game this Saturday, bringing the total to 24 river tiles and 174 standard tiles.

As a pure coincidence, there was a Board Game Geek forum post on Sunday related to making the games quicker by “Playing with less tiles”.

We don’t want to play with less expansions, so we are considering 3 ways to make our games shorter:
A. Set a timer and the game ends after exactly 2 hours.
B. The game ends when the first player reached 150 points.
C. Before the game starts, take 25 or 50 tiles out of the random stack and put them on the side.

This would also give us the opportunity to add more expansions back to the game to make it even more interesting, without making the games extremely long!

So, my question to the group is: does anyone else have any ideas on how to play games with a lot of extra expansion shorter?

PS: the new expansion that we added was The Wells.  Great expansion, the roads in that game, on average, scored just about as many points as the Cities!


Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=6353.0

[Snearone]

Does players draw next tile as soon as they lay down previous one, so they have time to think about it, or they wait for previous player to finish the move and then draw the tile?
In my experience this one is a must, as it greatly speeds up the game.

[PapaGeek]

Thanks for the reply, I definitely agree that looking at your tile as soon as you finish your previous turn will speed up the game.

We have talked about this in the past, BUT, knowing what your next tile will be basically eliminates your ability to make suggestions to the current player on where to place their tile.  This is especially true in games when we invite additional players to join us.

We actually purchased orange, brown, and purple meeples and phantoms so we can have up to 9 players!

[kothmann]

Remove tiles systematically?

—> Exp#1: include only 6 Inns + 2 Cathedrals
—> Exp#2: omit barrels
—> Exp#3: Omit Princess
—> Exp#5: Omit all tiles!
—> Exp#8: Omit Bazaars

That’s about 45 tiles removed!  And the disruptive bazaar mechanic is gone.

How would option B work with farms?!

[PapaGeek]

Thanks kothmann, I should have mentioned that for all of the options, when the game is “over”, you just stop laying new tiles and you then move to the standard end of game scoring based on the expansions that you started the game with.

[Scott]

I would suggest a round limit, so that each player gets an equal number of turns, and full potential access to every tile.

[Bumsakalaka]

Don't play time consuming expansions like
messages, bet offices, dragon, bazaar, plague, ...

Odoslané z SM-A202F pomocou Tapatalku

[PapaGeek]

Does players draw next tile as soon as they lay down previous one, so they have time to think about it, or they wait for previous player to finish the move and then draw the tile?
In my experience this one is a must, as it greatly speeds up the game.

I definitely like this idea for speeding up the game, but it does create a special situation if you are also playing with the Abbey tiles or Halflings.

Normally you make the decision to play an Abbey of Halfling BEFORE you look at your tile.  Would playing with the “pre-view” of your next tile allow you to play an Abbey of Halfling instead of the tile you are already looking at?  I assume if it did, you could not place the “pre-viewed” tile back in your stack.  Also would the rules force you to then play your “pre-viewed” tile the next round?

[Meepledrone]

We speed up our games by drawing the next tile at the end of your turn, we allow a player to place their abbey instead of placing the tile they drew. The player will place the drawn tile on their next turn.

It is more flexible than the actual rules but it works for us.

[Decar]

You could let players take two turns per turn too; that way you only have half the number of turns to play.

[kothmann]

You could let players take two turns per turn too

Wow.  You could place a meeple in position to join a big city and then with the second turn join the city, before the opponent has a chance to play defense!

Perhaps less severe and even faster would be to let players draw 2 tiles in advance and place both (perhaps adjacently, like a custom-made German Castle--to limit the possibilities) in step 1 of the turn, only afterwards going to step 2 (placing meeple / moving wood).

[Bumsakalaka]

After playing this weekend two games with catapult, it's absolute freezer of game speed.
But fun. We start to play carcassonne for points, it was just fun. I have to say, I was excited from this expansion. I was expecting something worse