Carcassonne: The Discovery

[avram]

Another new game at GC last night: Carcassonne: The Discovery, a great addition to the Carcassone series. It’s a simpler game than most in the series — three terrain types (grasslands, seas, mountains), plus one feature (cities), and that’s all you have to keep track of on the tiles.

The big innovation is the scoring rules. Scoring’s not automatic in Discovery. Each turn, after you place a tile, you can either place a follower or take one up. If you take it up, the feature it’s on scores points for you — full value if it’s complete, half value (usually) if it’s incomplete. Any followers left on tiles at the end of the game do score automatically, but count as incomplete even if they really aren’t. And you’ve only got four followers to work with, so your resources are much tighter than in most Carcassonne games.

It plays pretty quick, too. Even though there are more tiles than in original Carcassonne (84 instead of 72), we played two games, both with most players having never played before, and they both went pretty quick.

I also got into a game of Attribute (still fun, a good, simple social game), and a bit of late-night Falling.