Obsolete Your Idols

Pig Building

For Yule Heath gave me a copy of Carcassonne, the Deluxe edition with The River, Cathedrals & Lake-Inns, Pigs and Builders. He and I sat down and played it yesterday and it made for a longer, higher scoring game with more things to remember but still a lot of fun. It'd probably be even more fun with a larger number of players.

posted at 11:49 PST (-0800)     (comments disabled)   permanent link  

How Can You Lay There When You Gotta Get Up?

The last three times people have gotten together to play non-role-playing games at the house, it's been Carcassonne or one of its derivatives, with there being another variant and several expansions we've never played. The first is a representation of the real Carcassonne, with sprawling towns, winding roads, and abbeys. Both of the Rio Grande Games games which I've played have been enjoyable, highly competitive affairs. There's some element of politicking the way we play, persuading, suggesting and browbeating other players in to placing tiles in orientations and places which will benefit our own strategies. That's probably The Right Way to play, it's just amusing how heated exchanges can become over a game which is somewhat like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where a piece can be considered rightly or wrongly placed based on how many points the placement achieves for one.

The components are quite pretty, colorful and sturdy. Little wooden figures are the player's tokens, one races along the score track, the others are positioned on the expanding board in various roles, all of which involve claiming territory. The board is built as you play, using cards which are laid as tiles and much match feature-to-feature on the sides for a legal placement. There were no confusions as to what elements tiles depicted and how they were used in the game.

The rules are relatively simple and quite short. About two times through seemed to be enough for all of us to grasp gameplay with only occasional references for scoring logistics after that. The Hunters & Gatherers set has a few forward references in the rules but they're easy enough to loop around and resolve if you skim past the confusing bits on the first pass.

Here are two pictures Heath took of the game in play.

Update to remove broken image links.

posted at 08:38 PST (-0800)     (comments disabled)   permanent link