Citadels & Carcassonne

I was down visiting my parents and the in-laws last weekend, and on Saturday night we got a five player game of Citadels in, followed by a few games of Carcassonne.

I've not played Citadels in a good few months, so it was interesting to come back to it. There are definitely some things about it that I really like, I love that the person who finished the game gets a bonus but doesn't necessarily win. I love that the turn order is based on the role you chose, rather than your seating position. However, there are some things I don't like. While the roles that target a character rather than a player are definitely fun to play for the person who chose them, trying to second guess the target player's choice, they aren't so much fun for the player who gets hit by accident when they guess wrong. As a result you tend to end up going for the mediocre roles (i.e. not the Merchant or the Architect) as you don't want to be targeted by the Assassin or the Thief either intentionally or accidently.

Maybe I'm just bitter because the Warlord destroyed my Castle in the first turn, and I was assassinated in the second turn. After which I struggled to get back in the game. I didn't play an aggressive game (I don't think I chose the Assassin or the Thief once), so my combination of a fairly defensive strategy and my fear of the high-risk roles obviously didn't work out for me. In the end Suzy won with 25 points, and Matt, Jan and I came joint second with 22.

After that I played three games of Carcassonne. Just plain old vanilla Carcassonne, not even using the River expansion that ships with it. In the first game Matt won when Suzy joined up her second farmer with one of mine, shutting me out of the farming points I needed to sneak past him. Matt and I then played two 2-player games. Matt had won the first game without doing any farming (just some mammoth cities), so he stuck with that strategy while I farmed for England. In a 2-player game I think the farmers will always win the day, as proved to be the case in those games. Still, the more I play it (as you can tell, I'm playing it a lot at the moment) the more I like it, and I've had it several years now.

I also spent a decent amount of time on the weekend working out some Border Reiver ideas with my Dad (who's an artist and designer), trying out some of the feedback I got from BGG and pounding his colour printer until it ran out of ink :-). I've taken on board several of the BGG suggestions and will have new artwork available soon.