Sunday 3rd September 2006

Whilst Eleanor had an extensive afternoon nap Lisa and I sat down to play a game (and eat chocolate and drink coffee).

We elected to play 'Carcassonne - The Castle' . This is a game I bought a few weeks ago but that we had not had the chance to play.

It is a two-player game set in a medieval castle (predictably). It is essentially a tile-laying game like 'Carcassonne'. Followers are placed to score points during the game or at the end. Whilst 'Carcassonne' allows for the 'board' to be extensive and spreading, 'The Castle' features an enclosing wall (which doubles as a scoretrack). Tiles have to be placed within this.

We thoroughly enjoyed the game and found it more challenging than 'Carcassonne'. The board quickly felt cramped; working out where to place tiles was much harder than in the original game. As unfinished features do not score it is tactically harder to place followers. After two games we realised that the cards you can collect for landing on the corners of the scoring track are supposed to be seen by both players....that will make us play differently next time!

The meeples differ from the original game. We were not sure that they needed to really but they are still pleasant pieces. The tiles are colourful but felt a little too 'regimented' for me; the paths don't bend much and the rooftops are all identical. I would give this one an eight out of ten (in fact I have on Boardgamegeek ).

Final scores:

Game 1 - Lisa 97, Paul 73
Game 2 - Paul 99, Lisa 91


We then decided to have a quick hand of Canasta. I 'won' this but Lisa scored the most points. This is starting to become a regular occurrence. Lisa is much better than me at holding out for natural canastas. She also has an uncanny ability to pick up around three of the four red 3's per game (each worth 100 points!). As a result Lisa scored 1420 points in that hand to my 930.

At present the scores are:

Lisa 3015
Paul 3895

Lisa leads 2 rounds to 0.
How depressing!