Broke my four-game losing streak

[Boondocker]

I've got a couple of friends (who are a couple) that I play with from time to time, and I've been outplayed four times in a row; funny, since I introduced them to the game. We played tonight, using the base game, I&C, all of the tiles from A&M, and the bridges from BC&B (a hodge-podge, since both A&M and BC&B were new to them).

Normally one of them goes for a "farm early, farm strong" strategy, where he sets up a good field or muscles in on someone else's field. His girlfriend doesn't like farmers all that much, and normally tries to play a city-based game. This game, everything was topsy-turvy: she laid down two early farmers that got connected via the RFFF cloister tile, and suddenly had a large, difficult-to-share farm. He decided he'd rather go for cities and roads, and left her farm alone. That left me with a choice: try to steal the farm, or play my own game?

I went off on my own, building cities away from her farm when I could, and paying attention to roads. An Inn, the three-way roundabout, a bridge, and the big meeple let me steal a 28-point road from him, and I shared a 30-point cathedral city with his girlfriend. Towards the end, I made a half-hearted attempt to get a farmer into her field, but couldn't. Panicking about the dwindling tile supply, I started laying down farmers anywhere I could. Six isolated farmers later, plus a cloister, biggish-city, and a couple of roads, I had a good amount of points, enough that her 55-point farm couldn't pass me. I finally won a game.

A couple of things really stood out for me. First: abbeys are awesome. He used his to retrieve a trapped big'un meeple, she used hers to prevent me from using mine in the same spot (finishing my city, but preventing me from also snagging 9 cloister-points), and I used mine in the end-game to score as 8-point cloister. So versatile!

Second: bridges are also awesome! All of us managed to use at least one bridge to good advantage. I got particularly lucky by using one with a CFCF tile; this let me score two meeples that would have otherwise spent much of the game trapped. I can't recommend BC&B more, for the bridges alone. Useful and fun.

Third: late-game, edge-of-board farmers can make a huge difference! Rather than score for a 4-point city or place a meeple in a city that probably won't get completed, I plopped them down in the field for 6 points here, 9 there, 12 with the pig... it all added up very nicely, keeping me ahead of the others. It's totally obvious, I know, but I used to end games with more meeples in incomplete cities, cloisters, or on roads, and I'm sure it cost me. Obvious strategy FTW!

That's it; just wanted to blather on about winning one (out of five... doesn't sound so good when I put it that way).

[MrBlu]

Sounds like a fun game!  We finally got to play tonight too, a three player game.  Normally I come back to haunt the others and win, but my friend got us good tonight.  He got a huge jump in teh beginning.  He had like 289 and I had to 250-some.  We didn't even bother scoring the farms at the end, he'd have gotten a ton more....lol....