Wheel of Fortune

[Gwommy]

I played a 4 player game with just Carcassonne: Wheel of Fortune.  It was a close game: 4th=88pts, 3rd=92pts, 2nd=97pts, and 1st=100pts.  The game took about 45 minutes using all 72 tiles and one player that never played before.

Overall, I like the wheel of fortune.  Definitely better than the base game.  If you recieved a useless landscape piece, you can still place a meeple on the wheel to hopefully gain some extra points if the pig lands there.  The pig can only move a max of 3 spaces, so it does no good to put a meeple in the 6th slot if the pig is still on the first slot.  We were actually  playing a lot of meeples on the wheel.  Almost every time that the pig moved, someone got some points from the wheel, on top of the bonuses.  The biggest downfall to the wheel of fortune is that the total of pig movements on the landscape tiles is 29, which means that by the end of the game, the pig will end on the plague.  Near the end of our game, I only had one follower in play, so I lost my farmer with 7 cities on it.  Luckily, I still had one turn remaining and I was the next player after I had to remove my farmer, so I got to claim the farm again.

I liked the large size of the wheel as the starting tile.  It gives multiple people a chance to start a huge city at the beginning of the game.

[Whaleyland]

This is a re-post of my sessions report from BoardGameGeek:

I received Carcassonne – Wheel of Fortune in the mail on Friday, and so I decided that is must be tried by the end of the weekend so I can get a report presented. Tonight was the night and so it came out. I played it 2-player with my girlfriend and decided to try out Der Tunnel at the same time.

The Wheel Tile
One of the most visually different aspects of this expansion/spin-off to Carcassonne is the oversized starting tile. Even compared to the Count of Carcassonne, this is 4 tiles larger making a huge square. Somewhat surprisingly, it didn't become a major eyesore like I expected. It instead became the focal point of the game and something around which to build the game board. The available starting locations were fairly well balanced and I really have no complaint about the oversized Wheel tile.

Fortunes
Game play is, in fact, identical to Carcassonne. There really are no changes except for the Wheel options and tiles. In a rare moment of luck, I managed to evenly distribute the 19 Wheel tiles among the other 57 tiles we were playing with. There were no clumps or even pairs of Wheel tiles, which was very nice. When they came up, the Pink Pig moved around the wheel and we completed the next round. Since it was our first time, I was afraid that we would have to look at the rules booklet a number of times to figure out the cryptic meanings of the Wheel of Fortunes fortunes, but they are actually pretty straightforward one you realize that the little gold crowns equal points earned. In fact, the reasons we looked at the rules the most were to find answers to things not mentioned in the rules. It didn't happen much, but an FAQ by Matthew Harper will be eagerly looked for in the near future because Hans im Glück definitely leaves some information unresolved.

Crowns
We didn't really have any problems with the fortunes. They made sense, they balanced each other out, and they all had relatively equal likelihoods of being chosen. Where the game took an unexpected turn was the gambling crowns at the top of each fortune. My girlfriend decided to claim a crown first, but, not understanding the freedom of the choice, did not chose a 6-point crown. Her mistake caused her to neglect the crowns while I earned 18 points, gaining a nice lead over her. After that, both of us continued to claim 6-crown spots, balancing each other out fairly well. The crowns don't really do much in a 2-player game, it seems. If anything, it just causes someone to win by a landslide because of the next problem:

Lucky Breaks
Just like in the basic game, Wheel of Fortune has a large degree of luck to it. You don't choose your tiles, they are given to you by chance. With the addition of the Wheel, chance now occurs twice, sometimes, in the same turn. For me, that meant that whenever the Tax fortune was up, I had more knights and shields; whenever the Inquisition came, I had more monks. I also landed on the Fortune fortune twice, giving me free points. My girlfriend, meanwhile, only ever landed on the Famine, which earned her 1-2 points each time (we were tied for the big field throughout the game).

Game End
By the end of the game, I was just 7 points from lapping her. I had 119 and she had 76. It was not the best game she's ever played since she usually beats me at Carcassonne. Truly, the luck of the fortunes were in my favor since she built larger cities, claimed more fields, and completed more roads than I ever did.

Conclusion
Wheel of Fortune is a nice twist on the great game of Carcassonne, and I will definitely keep playing with it, but it requires skill to properly play to avoid a total defeat. It's strength, I imagine, is with 4-6 players, since the competition for claiming features and crown spots would be so much greater. For 2 players, the Wheel of Fortune seems to be able to predict its victor long before the game is ever finished.

Final Results
Quality: A
Price: A
Appearance: A-
Gambling feature: B+
Fortunes: B
2-Player playability: C+