Flashback Friday - Carcassonne - Love It or Hate It?

Love it but I play it exclusively on the XBOX because scoring.

It would be impossible to do better than Hive God's trenchant comment on it except to say that it's so cutthroat, so knife edge and knives out, that ultimately I find it pretty abstract and just ok.

I'm a big fan, but only at 2 player.

Presents itself as a game of building stuff but the main strategy is to keep anything from ever happening, which is dull. Only own The Castle, which I like a lot and don't play any of the others anymore.

Legomancer wrote: Presents itself as a game of building stuff but the main strategy is to keep anything from ever happening, which is dull. Only own The Castle, which I like a lot and don't play any of the others anymore.

That's very insightful. I have not thought about it this way.

I think it's a fine game although best as a casual activity to be enjoyed while having a conversation and a drink. I don't mind it with multiple people.

If playing with expansions I prefer to limit the tiles to about 15/player, randomly chosen from all tiles you're playing with. This has two laudable effects:

1. It controls the time. Carc is a fine game at 45 minutes but excruciating at 90+.
2. It keeps people from counting tiles, figuring that they have an X% chance of drawing the tile they need and adjusting their play accordingly. That is way too much effort to win a casual family game. (Alternately, just don't play with those people.)

My favorite version is the Ark of the Covenant.

Oh man, yes to the counting tiles problem if you were playing this truly competitively.

Carcassonne is my favorite popular game that nobody ever wants to play.

Like Dave, I also only ever play THE CASTLE in real life. It's gorgeous on the table and there is a lot of thinky stuff going on aside from How Much Can I Fuck You Up With This Tile from the regular game. That said, I didn't know how rough this game was until I played with some FATties in the iOS implementation. It was a gorefest of X's all over the board.

ubarose wrote:

ChristopherMD wrote: Carcassonne is my favorite popular game that nobody ever wants to play.

I'm surprised. It seems like a lot of people still play it. Do you think it has fallen by the wayside in general, or do you think it is just your crowd that doesn't want to play it?

I don't have a crowd anymore but back when I did the game sat on my shelf for years with no love. I suspect its similar to Catan in that a lot of people burned out on it early in their gaming careers or just moved on to newer stuff in general and never cared to looked back. I happen to find the game relaxing (although i do play cutthroat) and I do jigsaw puzzles as well so looking for where a piece goes is my cuppa tea.

Gary Sax wrote: Oh man, yes to the counting tiles problem if you were playing this truly competitively.

My box has extra tiles in it and damn that pisses people off on occasion. Entertaining as hell.

It's the main game my wife and I play together. We play cutthroat. We use like 6 expansions but not the extra rules except for some of extra meeples like the builder and mayor. My wife just likes having a ton of tiles. She plays the iOS version solo all the time so it's one of the few games where we are mostly evenly matched.