Tonight we played our first game using all 10 expansions - and using all the tiles too. Normally we only play one side of the tower dispenser, which shortens the game considerably, and adds to the randomness of the tiles. But tonight, having just received the GQ expansion, we played the whole thing - mega-Carc. 216 tiles, or exactly three times the size of the basic game. And it took a good 2 1/2 hours.
At the start of the game Alina and I pegged level for the most part, with Alina building up a small lead of about 20 points. Then I managed to edge in on a couple of her cities and ended up with a 70 point lead. None of the cities we built were particularly large - the biggest (mine) was only 13 tiles, and that included a Cathar tile, scoring a meagre 15 points (including pennants). There was only one real cathedral city, and, even though it was early on in the game, Alina played it against me, locking a meeple and my builder into a small, awkward city that took ages to complete. It scored 24 points in the end; and the other cathedral was maybe the third tile from the end and utterly useless.
I picked up an easy 6-tile road early on in the game, and so took the robber baron. Alina kept trying to build longer roads but was constantly thwarted, building several with 6 points - that is, until the very end of the game, when she managed to join up three separate stretches into a 7 tile road. Again, like the cities, not particularly big.
I'd probably describe the game as 'scrappy' - lots of small, closely-fought features, with lots of strategic use of towers (particularly on my part) to strip cities or farms of followers. The dragon, though ever-present, hardly achieved anything; and - oddly - neither of us touched the city of Carcassonne: there always seemed to be somewhere that needed a meeple.
The end of the game saw Alina catch up to about 20 points behind, completing a city with three barrels and a cotton, shaping up well for the final showdown. I ended up with 20 points on trade goods, while Alina had 30; she scored more on unfinished features, and the robber baron scored 34 to the king's 29. But in the end it came down to farms.
Not that any of the farms were overly impressive - there were a lot of two- or three-city farms, and only a couple of sizeable ones. I managed to get a farmer onto the farm lying between the branches of the river early on in the game, with 10 connecting cities, and a pig. Not bad, I suppose. But I had only one other small farm… Alina would have scored a lot more, except for malicious tower-play, and she only picked up a few points on farms at the end. Perhaps it isn't really fair to say it came down to farms, but farms
and towers. Final score was:
Matt 357, Alina 307.
