boardgaming in photos: Carcassonne - The Discovery, Saint Petersburg, Maori

18 Mar 2023. TTGDMY  did a playtesting session at Boards & Brews. This was Cedric's prototype. It looks like chess. Each player has 7 ninjas, each in a different colour. One of them secretly holds a scroll, and you don't know which among your opponent's ninjas is the scroll holder. To win you need to kill that scroll holder. You use dice to perform actions. Every round the dice are rolled, and the two players take turns claiming a die until each has three. One die will be unused. You then use the dice you have claimed to take actions. You need dice in the right colours to activate specific ninjas. You also need dice with the right values to perform specific actions. E.g. to get the light blue ninja to throw shuriken at an opponent ninja, you need to have both the light blue die and another die with the value 3. 

Boards and Brews is a nice new boardgame cafe. The owners have been running boardgame cafes for many years, but this location is new. It is more a cafe with boardgames than a cafe you go only for boardgames. The fee is based on minimum order amount as opposed to an hourly charge, so it's less stressful and you don't need to keep looking at your watch or hurrying your opponents. You can AP (analysis paralysis) as much as you want. The photo above shows a TCG area so it looks like a tournament setting. The other side of the cafe is like a coffee house. I like the ambience. Comfortable and relaxing. 

I am working on a dice game using 8-sided dice. This is already the third version. The first two didn't work and I had to restart. Only now the core mechanism feels somewhat feasible. There's more work I need to put in to get this to be a viable game. 

I asked younger daughter Chen Rui to play Maori with me. This is a light to medium weight game with a spatial aspect. You claim tiles from the centre of the table to add to your personal board, to form islands. You score points based on the various features of the islands, from palm trees and huts to flower circles and sea shells. 

This 4x4 grid is shared. The position of the boat indicates the row or column from which you can take a tile. On your turn you must advance the boat. If you take the tile right next to the boat, it's free. If you want to take a tile further away (but in the same row or column), you have to pay. 

This is my completed player board at the end of the game. Trees are normally worth just 1pt, but on an island with at least one hut, they are worth 2pts each. My large island at the top gave me 18pts! 

I played Saint Petersburg with elder daughter Shee Yun and Joti. This is a 2004 game, older than my daughter. Saint Petersburg can be described as a distillation of 80% of Eurogames out there. In a gist, make money in the first half, score points in the second half. You build your engine in the early half of the game, and then switch to running your engine at max speed to score as many points as you can before the game ends. Sounds familiar no? Many Eurogames sound like this. 

Shee Yun had two observatories, and put them to good use. She grabbed extra workers early, and that gave her an insurmountable lead. By game end, she scored more than 100pts. Joti and I couldn't beat her even after adding up our scores. A complete bloodbath. Observatories are powerful and we should not have let her buy two of them so early in the game.  

I like the artwork in this first edition of the game. Simple but unique style. The latest version has different artwork. 

This is Carcassonne: The Discovery. This was designed by Leo Colovini, and not by the designer of the original Carcassonne, Klaus-Jurgen Wrede. A few years ago I almost gave this game away, because I hadn't played it for a while. However this was vetoed by my wife Michelle. She's a supporter of Carcassonne (although at the time she too hadn't played this game for a long time). Now this game is out-of-print, and if you ask me now whether I'd give it away, I'd probably say no. I'm glad I hadn't given it away earlier. This is why you should listen to your wife. 

Carcassonne: The Discovery shares the same basic rules as the original Carcassonne. However when you sit down to play, it feels very different. I find it more a gamer's game than a casual game. You can play Carcassonne in a relaxed manner. Carcassonne: The Discovery presents many difficult decisions so you can't run away from some brain exercise. 

One difference from Carcassonne is that the scoring of completed features is not automatic. You don't just take back your meeple (pawn) immediately. You have to spend an action to take it back and score points. On your turn, you must place a tile, and then you may perform an action. Your options are either place a meeple, or recover a meeple. When a feature is completed, your meeple still stays put. You need to spend an action to get it back. 

Scoreboard

There are only three scoring methods in Carcassonne: The Discovery, compared to Carcassonne which has four. However they are more complicated. You score points for having your meeples on mountains, plains or seas. Unlike Carcassonne, there won't be majority competition on the same feature. Everyone who is involved gets to score points. You can't deny other players by placing more of your meeples than them. You can at most try to prevent them from joining their feature to yours. Without the majority competition, the player interaction is still pretty high. There is still incentive to collaborate. You don't lose much in the strategic richness of the game. 

Michelle and I are Carcassonne veterans. Yet we played Carcassonne: The Discovery like we were newbies - slow and ponderous. It was embarrassing. Yes, the rules are different, and we hadn't played this for a long time, but I believe the biggest factor is this is a more challenging game. It felt great rediscovering this game. We did a four player game, with Shee Yun and Joti. At game end, Michelle and I tied for the win. That was amazing, since it was a game with scores above the 100s. 

Box cover. Mine is a German edition. 

I recently received my copy of Horseless Carriage, the latest game from Splotter Games. Their previous game and a huge hit was Food Chain Magnate in 2015. So it has been 8 years. I'm a big fan of Splotter and am now confident to buy their new games without having tried them. After punching out all the game components from their sprues and bagging them, they no longer fit inside the box. There are many bits inside this game! Now the box lid is slightly lifted.