Carcassonne Central

Played these two on Friday evening.

Cant for the life of me see how Agricola is the top game in Europe, it was an OK game but nothing special, infact it seems messy and not enough playing pieces have been produced to cope with a four player game.

Race For The Galaxy, not a bad card laying game and over very quickly, but if I wanted a card game I would go for Domain.

I was at my FLGS yesterday and asked about Agricola vs Dominion (both of which I was looking at).  I was told that Dominion was the better of the 2 as it involves more strategy, but Agricola was more fun.

How easy was it to pick up the game (for Agricola), Steve, and did it take long to play your first game?

Nov the game lasted about 1 hour. The rules are pretty basic once you get past the confusing way they are written.

It is an easy game to play, consists of about 12 rounds where you take turns to grab resources and farm.

Dominion is so much better, although £30 for a deck of cards is a lot. You really get the chance to screw people over in this game and its a lot more competetive.

I've been planning to buy Dominion now for a while and asked for it for my birthday. I play Agricola and got it for Christmas. However, I definitely agree that the rules are written terribly. It took me three tries to finally get all the nuances, and only after watching the Dice Tower episode on Agricola did I finally get it. I was missing some mechanic or something. Regardless, I really like Agricola, but despise how Z-Man Games doesn't include the animeeples and vegimeeples, and how the game has so many pieces just to set it up. I am tackle-boxing the set when I get back in the US, just so I can play without the 20 minutes set-up time.

Other games on my list are Ticket to Ride, Stone Age, and El Grande. I have the BGG promo cards for Dominion and the HiG Almanac pieces for Stone Age (which came with The Cult), so those are high on my list.

Which of those four games—Ticket to Ride, Stone Age, Dominion, and El Grande—do you guys prefer?

I can only comment on Ticket to Ride.  Haven't played the others, but I really liked it.  I played the US and EU versions.  The train stations in the EU version are a nice touch.

Stone age is nice, and very beautiful. I have no interest in Agricola what so ever - but I truly enjoy Stone age.

El grande is fantastic.

Well, as Steve has posted elsewhere, I'm actually a bigger TtR fan than I'm a Carc fan.  If you are getting that, definately go for the US map with the 1910 expansion, but that is only optimally played by at least 4 players.  The European maps are really optional (Marklin introduces train stations, Nordic has a long route, Switzerland has destination tickets, all 3 have some combination of tunnels and ferries), but you may want to get them if you usually play with less than 4 players - Switzerland would be the best map IMO for 2 - 3 players.  Skip the dice and the card versions, they are IMO inferior to the base game, unless you are the type that actually prefers dice throwing to card drafting.

There's a whole thread on Stone Age I think...

Stone Age is a prehistoric version of Agricola so dont go there.

Ticket to Rid eis cool but I prefer Railroad Tycoon (The Boardgame) with the Europe Expansion.

El Grande is good too.

Dominion comes into its own as a card game, cant compare it to the others as it is completely different.

Not much help sorry. Win the lottery and get em all   ;D