Following our Kingmaker epic which went on over several evenings, we decided to try something a bit more concise for our latest attempt at family time (I'm not sure a back-stabbing game like Kingmaker is conducive to family bonding anyway).
This time I suggested Carcassone. I'm guessing everyone's familiar with this but the gist of the game is to control cities, roads and monasteries that are laid down by each player. While my wife is incredibly tolerant of my hobbies, games aren't really her thing although she does usually manage to win. I suspected this would be more up her street...partly because I knew she's quite enjoyed playing a travel version of Settlers of Catan but also because it's pretty time limited (once all the tiles are played the game is over) so I suspected she be keener on this that an 4 day Kingmaker epic.
I haven't actually played this for ages so I was a bit rusty on the mechanics and this quickly showed when wife and son shot ahead of me on the points table...my son has a nasty tendency to stitch opponents up by making it really difficult to play the tiles you want due to his careful placement.
I knew Callum had read through the rules (they're only 4 pages long) but forgot Elaine hadn't and wasn't fully aware of the impact that counters deployed as farmers can have in the final points tally. I managed to grab lots of points right at the game end and win but a little bit unfairly as the others hadn't realised the potential for this. Now I feel quite bad...
I guess we'll have to settle it via rematch!
My wife is a bit of a whizz with farmer placement in this game :)
ReplyDeleteCarcassonne is a great game because it plays as well with two people as it does with six. This makes it very versatile. It suffers from having too many expansions, but we limit our games to the Inns and Cathedrals (which have some nice extra tiles, the big meeples and chamces to score bonus points for cities and roads or royally screw someone who's going for a big city) plus King and Scout (which give extra points at the end based on the number of cities and roads completed - always 14 of each in my experience :) )
Needless to say Carcassonne has been a family favourite since the children were about 5.
But we're also a family that can happily play back-stabbing games - we also played Carcassonne yesterday, with two families, but finished up with a few vicious, cut-throat games of Cosmic Encounter.
We only have the basic set with the river expansion...I must look at some of the others.
ReplyDeleteWe have the River as well, but we never really found that it did much for the games, so haven't used it in years.
ReplyDeletesounds very interesting I must check it out
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