Game Day Lunch: Carcassone + Azul

I had forgotten how fun Carcassonne is. It’s a fairly simple tile-laying worker-placement game that takes less than ten minutes to teach. Today I introduced our Game Day Lunch crew to this game, as none of them had played before.

Carcassonne is an actual city in France, with a history that dates base thousands of years. It has been at times under Celtic, Roman, Spanish and of course French control. The architecture of the city influenced the graphics of the game. None of this impacts how the game is played, but it’s fun to know.

We played the base game with the River expansion at lunch today. The River allows us to have a few turns to talk about laying tiles and claiming bits of terrain. (Some of the river tiles and roads, and at least one has a part of a castle.) Once we got through that part we started laying out the city itself. As suggested in the game, we did not use Farmers for our first game. Despite that, we did have some interesting situations come up. One player started a fairly large castle; I proceeded to weasel my way into a share. 🙂 As the castle was nearly complete, I pointed out that if she played a particular tile this way then she could place a meeple which could potentially connect to the big castle we currently were joint owners of. Having a second meeple would give her two knights to my one, resulting in the failure of my weaselness. Weaselicity? Whatever, it doesn’t matter…she was able to claim the castle by herself in the end.

Every player scored over 50 points. One of us (that would be me) just barely. I am sure we left a lot on the table due to inefficient play (and no farming) but two of us were new and I had not played in quite a while. Plus I was trying to be a good host. As a good host, I came in last. 🙂

Since we had extra time we played a quick game of Azul. As we were close to finishing the game I had to stand up to help someone. When I leaned over the table, my work badge managed to drag right across my board! 😯 I was able to figure out how to re-position my tiles, but my score cube was also off of my board. I had no idea what my score was. While I had a good ending position, I decided to forfeit as my score was unknown. Again, a good host. 😉

Results? Carcassonne is definitely on the “repeat me” list, and Azul has also been requested multiple times. That’s a good sign, as if people were not enjoying the games, they would not ask for them to come back. I think next time we’ll again play Carcassonne, and this time without my coaching. And my weaseliciousness.