At yesterday afternoon's game session, a girl showed up saying she wanted to play something non-aggressive and peaceful, so one guy pulled out *Carcassonne*.
I even chimed in like an idiot: "Yeah yeah yeah, this one's just everyone building the map together, super healing."
Half an hour later, the tension at the table was thick enough to blow the table up.
Early game is indeed peaceful and lovely—you build your roads, I build my castles. But once mid-game hits and the board starts connecting, everyone's civility completely vanishes.
I painstakingly used seven or eight tiles to build a giant castle, and just as it was about to be closed off for big points, that guy placed two tiles next to it and forcibly sent two meeples to "mooch" into my castle!
What pissed me off most? He didn't even help build the walls—he just came over to steal the property I'd worked so hard to build! At final scoring, he had more meeples than me, and the entire castle's points got sucked away by him. I literally did a whole game of unpaid labor for him.
And that "lying in the grass" farmer mechanic is even more ridiculous. Early on nobody cares, but in the last few rounds, all four players went crazy lying meeples down on the grass. To fight for absolute control of that farmland, people stopped building roads entirely and desperately shoved tiles into other people's fields.
By the end, that girl was completely shut down, because her farmland was surrounded dead tight by us three big guys' farmers, and she got zero points.
What kind of healing tile-laying game is this? This is clearly a no-holds-barred "hostile real-estate takeover simulator"!
I've seen through it now—the more harmless an old game looks, the more vicious the backstabbing is. When you guys played Carcassonne before, did you ever have that desperate moment when a castle about to be closed off got forcibly invaded by someone else's meeples?
#Carcassonne# #Carcassonne# #TilePlacement# #ClassicBoardGame#