Last Christmas, Mom got me and Meredith a game called Carcassonne, a game about building walled cities and the roads and landscapes about the cities. You try to use knights to control cities, thieves to control roads, monks to control monasteries, and farmers to control the fields around cities. You build the map one randomly drawn tile at a time, which must be placed in a logical connection somewhere on the existing map. Meredith and I finally got around to playing it twice last weekend during Thanksgiving break. It is a good game, with a fair amount of brow-creasing strategy in placing your followers. Knights, monk, and thieves score big during the game, but farmers can score huge at the end of the game. If you place too many farmers, you run out of followers to place during the game.

The first game, Mer ran way out in front by placing lots of knights in small cities, and by placing thieves. I concentrated on farmers. Since it was the first game, we were not totally sure about the best strategy. It turns out that the small cities that Mer was building scored me big points from my farmers at the end of the game. Mer invested in farmers too late to challenge my farmers, so I ended up supplying all but one city on the board, and I won by a few points (we found out we had been scoring cities incorrectly, so it is not clear what I won by – it could have been anywhere from 1-5 points). I think I actually may have won because we had holes in the map – those sorts of things bug Mer, and it may have distracted her in her thinking about the game.

Mer totally smashed me in the second game. She managed to place knights in cities and thieves on the roads, which scored her points right away. She also drew a few more monasteries than I did, which got her off to a big lead early. She then concentrated on matching my farmers, but only as she needed to. This left her pieces free to be knights for much of the game, while my pieces were tied up being farmers (farmers are always farmers in the game, and the piece is lost once played as a farmer). She also built huge cities so that my farmers could not score so big if I won the farming part of the game. The second game actually came down to the last three tiles. Meredith was trying to connect up her last farmer to the rest of the fields. If she succeeded, she would neutralize my farmers. If she could not connect her farmer, I would end up supplying all of the cities. Sadly, for me, she found the tile she needed, and she won by 50 points (ouch!).

One of the fun things about the game is that Mer and I visited the real walled city of Carcassonne in southern France. It was one of my favorite places in all of France. The old walled city is still intact, and is fun to wander around in. I hope to return to blogging about the France trip over Christmas break (kind of a six-month return!).