Carcassonne Central

Hello Carc-Heads.  I'm interested in everyone's favorite tricks to trap their fellow Carcassonne players during a game.  I'm a firm believer that if you only play offense in this game you'll lose by a mile.  When I started playing I always tried to just go for points each turn.  I learned slowly that knowing when to score and when to pounce on your opponents is a critical skill.

My favorite way to mess up my rivals is to wait until near the end of the game and use a crafty tile (like and "elbow" road tile) with my double sized settler on it to sieze huge amounts of field space.  If you do it at the right time and you keep track of the tiles that are left to pull the other players will be helpless and you can laugh at them....and then demand that as the winner they go get you your favorite beverage, then clean and reset the game for another go. 

Ah the spoils of victory.......so without letting all of your secrets out of the bag (no pun intended) tell me how you like to ruin the days of the folks playing against you.

Few things are more satisfying than to, towards the end, add a cathedral to an opponent's big unfinshed cities. That's not a regular occurence though - but when it does happen ... yay!

Since we alwyas play with extended road rules (busches are considered junktions - not ends) you can add a four-way junktion as well. Makes for a nice challange ;) (Best with inns).

There are many ways - but these two popped up right now. I'm sure I'll get back on the topic :)

I'm constantly trying to encroach on other people's buildings - connecting to an already occupied city, finishing a someone else's city off in order to get the trade goods, the king, or put a meeple in Carcassonne. Really ticks my girlfriend off. Her defence, which really ticks me off, is to hardly build at all in the last third of the game - she reverses the tables completely. So she doesn't build, forcing me to build instead, and then steals my buildings.

Subtlety... try to anticipate what your opponents are going to do 3, 4, 5 moves ahead, their big play, then innocently thwart them.  8)

Played a three player game last night and used a tactic of shutting down the opponents cities very quickly forcing him to score low amounts and giving me the trades within. It worked well as it annoyed the hell out of him and he forgot to lookto his farmers, which he is normally very good with, and this allowed me to place a few farmers near the end that stole his cities from him. Didnt build much myself just scored from one 20 point city a few roads and a couple of cloisters.

Good game though.

Oh I love the cathedral at the end of the game trick....there's really no better way to ruin a good friends day than that....

Yes I've done the Cathedral trick as well - in fact if you pick it up late in the game its quite possibly your only play - you can throw it on a nuetral (unmeepled) city or city start, but that's generally worth nothing to you - better to sting the opposition.

Another thing I have done once with a Cathedral is play it relatively late in the game on the opponents city but early enough that they still had a go at completing it (and add a few more tiles to it) - when they were within one "cap" piece of completing the city I played a road next to where the "cap" piece was required (so that a specific tile was needed) rather than just any old "cap".  A bit cruel and I wasn't all that popular - [in the last 2 to 3 tiles the opposition didn't pick up any "caps" anyway, so I didn't feel quite so mean] 

Just found this thread, thought I would add my two cents to this rather that starting a new one :)

We play Mega-Carc with amost expansions and all of the tiles. Sometimes space becomes an inhibiting factor. If my opponent is building a large city, I sometimes add a tile (or two) to the city that takes it to the edge of the table to prevent it from ever being closed. I know, that is evil. Space management can be as important in this game as tile and meeple management.

Happy Carc'ing...
...Matt