New Games!

This week, we got in a couple new games. The first was Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers, which was played by Jake, Manny, and Chris.

We didn't get to play the entire game... Chris showed Manny and Jake had to play, and as we were playing, people wandered by, and we wanted to include them, so we cut it a bit short -- probably didn't even get halfway through.

The Carcassonne series is sort of a modern classic. These games are great balance of ease-of-learning, interesting and varied gameplay, and strategy. Funagain.com lists five Carcassonne games among their top 33 games sold.

Basically all the Carcassonne games involved playing tiles to build cities/rivers/forests/meadows and other things. You place characters on the board to gain control of those to get points when they are completed. Some characters remain on the board to be scored at the conclusion of the tile-laying.

Here's some things that happened as we played:

• Manny claimed the first points with a quick river claim for 4 points.
  
• Chris next claimed a 7 point river.
  
• Manny got another 4 point river quickie.
  
• Jake broke onto the scoreboard with a 3 point river quickie.
  
• Manny got a 4 point river.
  
• Chris got a 4 point forest.
  
• Jake completed a large forest, AND got a quick forest on the same turn for a nice 12 point play!
  
• Chris got a 5 point river.
  
• Manny, picking up his fourth river/lake tile in a row, claimed another 3 point river quickie.
  
• Jake got a 5 point and a 4 point river back-to-back....
  

And then we called it quits to get some other people involved. Jake was comfortably ahead, but there was a lot of game left to play...