First Game with Burgen in Deutschland!

[SRBO]

Hello all,

Yesterday i played my first match with the new castles. As soon as the package was open i pulled my brothers away from their pc and made them play the game.

As i directly wanted to know how it was with both the abbey and halflings i also used them.

My setup was pretty simple,
- wagon, builder, bog follower, pig,
- halflings, abbeytiles, I&C, T&B, river and the festival.

here a list of my positives and negatives: (please keep in mind that the players i played with aren't really that much into the game as i am.)

  They just look awesome, the graphics on them are very detailed and look beautiful.
  The fact that they are 2 by 1 isn't a problem at all, you can easily put them on a lot of places. You really have to think about if you can complete the feature or not.
  The phantom is pretty powerful. As soon as you put a follower on the castle you can put a phantom on a road to score a lot of quick points. as my brothers normally forget to play with these, yesterday i saw them use them very effectively.
  there are no problems if you use the abbey and halflings also. you really need to think about your strategy because you now are able to control a piece of the board. all because you know exacly wich tiles you can play..
  on the back are 2 C's and a line. which also looks just fine.
  everyone liked it very much, so the fun factor is there:)

  You have another pieces just in front of you, more options, this makes you forget about it pretty quickly.
  You can almost put it everywhere, which doesnt make it a very special piece that really gives a value, the mechanics are fun.. but we seen it before (darmstadt and cloister), with an abbey, you really need to have a gap. and the halflings are very usefull blocking tiles.. The castles just dont have it..


Please let know what you liked:)


Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=1663.0

[fastertove]

Hi SRBO

Personally I'm not a huge fan of the half-tiles. Don't like that you start with them, and I think they are a little overpowered.

Regarding the new castles, I'm personally going to shuffle 4-6 creative tiles with the rest.
When you get a creative tile, you get to draw a random castle from a bag.
Any way. I'm still waiting for the mailman so I might change my mind

Btw, I agree that the castle expansion is more balanced. And I really like the design.

[Leven]

They just look awesome, the graphics on them are very detailed and look beautiful.

I agree. My only disappointment is that the colours don't match the tiles of the original game. The green shade of the farms is – again – much darker (just like the farms on the Festival and the Wind roses tiles). Fortunately the tiles of my other recent purchase, the Dutch/Belgian Monasteries don't have such problem.

[jungleboy]

M
I agree. My only disappointment is that the colours don't match the tiles of the original game. The green shade of the farms is – again – much darker (just like the farms on the Festival and the Wind roses tiles).

Sigh. Really? I don't understand how it can be so hard to get this right. It really bugs me.

[Decar]

My garden has at least 3 different shades of grass depending on the prevalent species - I get around this problem by considering the fields/farms of Carcassonne being made up of different interconnecting chunks of grass 

[Whaleyland]

You can also consider each tile equivalent to a parcel of land locally farmed by a single person. Each may use a different type of grass with varying shades of green. The job of the player isn't to connect the fields for Farms so much as to claim lordship over the fields, gaining feudal tenure from the Farms.

[SRBO]

I sometimes even choose the expansions i play with, by color of the grass, but when you see the entire field when i play with different colors really doesnt annoy me

[spikey_dino]

Regarding the new castles, I'm personally going to shuffle 4-6 creative tiles with the rest.
When you get a creative tile, you get to draw a random castle from a bag.

I love the idea of playing that way!  I need to buy some blank tiles now....

[SRBO]

Regarding the new castles, I'm personally going to shuffle 4-6 creative tiles with the rest.
When you get a creative tile, you get to draw a random castle from a bag.

I love the idea of playing that way!  I need to buy some blank tiles now....

That is indeed a very good idea . you could do the same with the halflings..

[franks]

My wife and I played our first game with these last evening.

I liked the idea from fastertove, of the random draw but was concerned that the tiles wouldn’t come into play until late game when they might have less impact. We mostly play a Mega Carc game.

We settled with drawing one tile each to start and decided to keep them hidden, (this isn’t specified in the rules, that was our choice). The tiles were played by both of us early game to take advantage of scoring sooner as Castles.

After that we drew one more tile each. I considered limiting this to 4 tiles but we felt no harm in finally taking 3 tiles each.

With the tiles coming into play early we found that with the number of roads also closed of the central area a bit more than usual. We also played more for the Castle scoring rather than using the city and road end to complete features.

In the end we find the Halfling tiles more engaging and to have a greater impact on play than the Castles but are still a novel and enjoyable addition. We especially appreciate the artwork.

As an aside, we love the sandbox aspect of Carcassonne and I was also tempted to try adding small wooden King and Queen Chess pieces that could be played exclusively for the Castles. This would save tying up a normal Meeple. In this variant a player would get one King and Queen each. After scoring as the Castle keeper (only), return them to your pool. Thoughts?

[jungleboy]

I played my first two games with the German Castles today and I think it's a great addition to the game. We were only two players, so we gave ourselves three castles each and had a lot of fun with them. What I like most is that it creates opportunities to get significant points on small cities/roads that are attached to the castle. You know when you draw a t-junction road and you have nowhere good to place it and you end up claiming a two-point road? Now that's a five-point road. So there's a lot of points to be gained. But unlike the German (etc) Monasteries, the points with the German Castles don't seem out of proportion to the rest of the game.

The phantom is pretty powerful. As soon as you put a follower on the castle you can put a phantom on a road to score a lot of quick points. as my brothers normally forget to play with these, yesterday i saw them use them very effectively.

I agree, we also played both games with the phantom and this was a cool feature.