by Tardigrade Matsuri
I introduced
Carcassonne to my family last month because my brother and his daughter (6) were visiting my parents, and our childhood games at their place don't stand the test of time. For example, my niece plays
Uno, which I don't think is very good for kids because the take-that mechanics invite tantrums. I thought
Carcassonne would fill the gap of a child-friendly game that entertains adults as well.
Playing the second edition,
Carcassonne claims to be good for players 7 years old and up. My niece is very gifted intellectually, but she's lagging emotionally. One more reason to stay away from
Uno. I figured she could handle
Carcassonne. I was right and wrong—but in an interesting way that other players hoping to introduce games to children might want to consider.
Game 1: Base game, no farmers. Players were my mother, brother, niece, and me. I played last, so I drew only 17 tiles, one fewer than the other players. Here are the results:
I had little difficulty explaining the rules. My niece understood them and didn't misplay, e.g. by trying to place followers on other players' features. So far so good.
The game progressed well for my niece, but not from her perspective. She drew city tile after city tile, which would satisfy most players, but as her city grew larger and larger, the other players began scoring while she hadn't a point to her meeple. No amount of explaining to her that she would eventually be awarded the city's points, even if she didn't finish it, helped. In hindsight, the crucial moment was when she drew the city-city-city-city tile. It can be hard to close that off.
At this point she threw her first tantrum. "Everybody has points but me! I hate this game! This is the worst game ever!" or something to that effect.
Two more problems arose for her. One, a hole in her city developed that I suspected could not be filled. In the image, it's identified as "A," just south of what I think was the start tile ("S"). It could only be filled by a field-road-field-city tile, which the base tile set doesn't have. In fact, my research indicates that only Inns & Cathedrals has such a tile.
The second problem was the tile to the left of "A." The city tiles to the north of it were placed by my brother and me (I was trying to connect to him). Then, my niece drew this field-city-field-city tile. I don't know if she had no other options, but she connected her city to my brother's city (mine was connected later). On the one hand, it increased the odds one of us would pull the F-R-F-C tile, which at the time I thought existed, and place it to close the city for her. On the other hand, she would need to share the points with us.
By this point, my niece had had it with
Carcassonne. She insisted on playing on my brother's team, which was a clever strategic move because he ended up winning the game by a plurality of points, with my mother and me trailing him by about 20 points, and my niece further behind.
One aspect that vaulted him above us was that I never drew any monasteries. It's a problem I've seen happen before when I played with some friends (and was again the last player of five). A weakness of base
Carcassonne is that the more players there are the higher the likelihood of wide tile swings against players. I'm confident that in a four- or five-player game it's not possible to win without drawing the monasteries. I'll discuss this topic below.
So what lessons for those considering introducing
Carcassonne to children? A practical one is that I'd hesitated to include the abbey tiles from Abbey and Mayor, and wow do I regret that decision. For younger or inexperienced players it can really help fill a nasty tile gap. The base game and many of the expansions can't save players from many situations, and even if they do have appropriate tiles, players who need them might not draw them.
Lesson number two is that I misestimated my niece's reaction to the game. I remember as a child (and this could be wrong) hating games when I believed I was going to lose. The game is fair when I'm winning, not when I'm losing. I didn't expect my niece to take her lack of points in itself as an indicator of the game's unfairness. She lacked the capacity yet to consider what would happen in the game's future.
Because
Carcassonne is usually a longer game than
Uno, I think I'll recommend that she keep playing on my brother's team—with abbeys.
(Incidentally, my brother and I are color-blind, so all the players were either color-blind or carriers of the gene (probably, genetics can get complicated). Many players dislike the color scheme of the second edition, and while I think I like the original edition's style better, it sure looks drab to me. So for those of you who think it looks like Kool-Aid vomit, recognize that those of us who can't see some colors so well have a reason to prefer it.)
Game 2: Base game, no farmers, with abbeys. My niece and mother bowed out so the remaining two games were just between my brother and me. This game took roughly ten minutes. What struck about it was that (a) the board was very contiguous (notice no need to place any abbeys), and (b) I drew five of the six monasteries, four of which I closed. I won this game decisively.
Here's the map:
Game 3: Base game, no farmers, with abbeys. This game was the most interesting strategically and tactically. I decided to change my play style to aggressively poach as many of my brother's cities as I could. In game 2, we just kept to ourselves, and I'm not here to play multiplayer solitaire. My brother joked that my lack of aggressiveness served me so poorly in my last game, but I pointed out that winning by luckily drawing monasteries isn't good gameplay. I should play anticipating a bad draw.
In the circled cities (thanks to the abbey) we fought very aggressively. I had three followers down to his two. However, the abbey ultimately filled a gap that I pondered about closing. I had three followers tied up, but I remembered that one C-C-C-C tile that would fill it. The odds were slightly less than even that I'd draw it because in a two player game it's a 36-35 tile split, and I was the second player. Do I hope for the odds or do I play the abbey, get my followers back and walk away from this one.
I played the abbey, severing the city into multiple parts and ending the stalemate.
Later on I drew the C-C-C-C tile, which, to be honest, may or may not have happened had I not played my abbey. If things are different, they're different.
I believe the monastery split was 4 for my brother and two for me. My brother closed off all of his (36 points), but I couldn't complete any of mine (14 points). 22 points is a pretty bad monastery deficit, but ultimately I lost by about 17 points. Had I waited on the C-C-C-C tile and plucked it, my deficit would've shrunk to just 1 point, and I probably could've played my abbey tile in the gap marked "A" on the map for the victory.
I was very satisfied with this game because it showed that aggressive strategy and patient tactics can win the game over poor monastery breaks.
Monastery Math: Just how bad is it? This was the question these and other games of
Carcassonne have raised.
There are six monastery tiles in the base game, and players draw 71 tiles among them (in the original edition I think its 72). Thanks to MS Excel's "hypgeomdist" formula it's easy to calculate the odds of successful tile draws. In a two-player game, it looks like this.
So a 4-2 split, like in game 3, happens about a quarter of the time. A 5-1 split (game 2) occurs in about one game in twelve.
Within each split is a distribution of how soon players draw their monasteries. In some games, they will be backloaded and harder to finish, but that's probably rare. Monasteries are point-topias in
Carcassonne. They're easy to surround, and multiple monasteries readily help one another. I'm guessing that a monastery scores more than 8 points in a game on average. Thus a 4-2 monastery split creates a 16-point deficit, which won't be that easy to clear other tile draws being equal. In game 2, with the one-in-twelve 5-1 split in my favor, that's a 24-point deficit, which is really hard to overcome.
In a four-player game, the distribution looks like this.
One important strategy is to not be the fourth player.
Okay, the stakes of a
Carcassonne game ought to be low, but player count and position do matter. In one in eight of these games, though—and I think that was the case for my game 1—the 3-x-x-x split pretty much guarantees a 16-point advantage over at least one other player.
Lesson: Adding expansions (or even just the abbot mini in the base game), including their scoring mechanisms and not just their tiles, will probably help even out endgame scores, especially when multiple players are present. Beyond this, and I've written enough on this subject so I'll step off soon, it might be wise to remove one or two of the F-F-F-F monasteries to balance out the game.
I'm interested in other players' thoughts on how they think the math affects
Carcassonne's balance.
