Carcassonne Central

How many people here would be willing to take part in a Carcassonne-related experiment? It would probably be a week or so before I'm ready to run the experiment, and it will probably only take a couple of hours of your time (if that).

I might be up for something.  It would have to be after the 19th - final exams and such kinda puts a time constraint on everything else.

I'm intrigued -- what do you have in mind?

I would have no problem with this, as long as it's not too controversial of course! :)

If you tell me what's in your mind, I'm in. But I hate shoots in the dark.

Ok... since people here would like to know more...

I'm actually trying to test a number of things with this experiment. The first of these is to investigate how best to give orders for placing tiles and figures when you have to give orders for multiple tiles in sequence. To test this, when this experiment begins, I will provide a list of about 100 tiles and ask you to place them one after the other onto the board, as if you were playing a solo version of Carcassonne. Now that might seem a lot, but I'm trying to include a lot of the "problem cases", which are mostly the complicated tiles in terms of adding followers to them, but will also likely include tile placements where it may not be straightforward to explain its placement. I won't be looking for people to look through the entire list of tiles and try and work out what the best score possible is for the sequence of tiles. I will just be looking for you to place the tiles with the same amount of thinking time you would usually use when playing the game.

I will likely be ready to do this sometime next week, and that is when the second part of the experiment will become apparent.

So you want a Carc study? Count me in!!!

I wouldn't exactly call it a study. It's not like I'm doing this for academic reasons or anything...

That was just a matter of speech. I take Carc on the serious side of the game.

Ok. That took longer than I expected it to, but I think I can blame the time of year for most of that...

Attached is 4 pages of tiles, showing all 115 tiles that I would like you to place, alone with the start tile. They are given in lines of 5 at a time, along with a count of how many tiles you will have left to place after each line.

Your instructions are to play the tiles one at a time (reading across then down), and to deploy your workforce (which consists of 7 followers, 1 wagon, 1 pig, and 1 barn) onto the newly created land. For each tile, describe where you place it, and describe any MTW action that takes place, and then make note of any scoring that takes place. Try to use a consistent and unambiguous method of writing your "orders".

Try not to spend more time deciding on a placement than you normally would while playing the game. Somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute feels reasonable. You won't have the ability to think on your opponent's turns, though, so this may increase the amount of time that you need, but try to keep it reasonable.

You may find it more convienient to look at each row of tiles instead of placing just one at a time. While I am not opposed to this (and in fact I put them in rows of 5 for this reason), please let me know if you did this, and try not to let the extra information lead to an increase in time.

This should probably only take about 2-3 hours to do, although I'll give you a couple of weeks to do this. Feel free to ask any questions that you need to.

The upload folder is full, so I've uploaded the images seperately.

(http://pici.se/thumbs/t_FOxLNToPR.gif) (http://pici.se/341173)(http://pici.se/thumbs/t_IyWUMOyZr.gif) (http://pici.se/341174)(http://pici.se/thumbs/t_hEYIigZhz.gif) (http://pici.se/341175)(http://pici.se/thumbs/t_TUrPbdzyT.gif) (http://pici.se/341176)

Perhaps next monday I'll do that!

Are you still looking for "guinea pigs"? I'd be willing to give it a try.

What ever came of this?  What is phase 2?  I will have some time in a week or so if you still want someone to do it. 
I need help with some of the symbols though.  I don't have my tiles in front of me right now...  Counting from the End, what is the large brown circle like on tile #4?  What is the gray arrow looking thing with the question mark on it like on tile #12.