The Counting House - a new twist on the Count of Carcassonne

[Carcking]

Hello to all the CC gamers. I've been toying with this concept in my mind for a few months now and have been building in on paper. I hope you all find it worth while. We've play tested it only twice so far and with only three players.

I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback on it.

The concept is to eliminate the free land grab by players just because they have a follower in the City of Carcassonne. The mechanic is to cause players to have to pay a fee of gold coins to the player when they are trying to squat on his feature during scoring. I don't have a good sense how it will play with larger groups yet - hopefully one of you guys can try it out. You can easily sub in any kind of token to represent gold coins.

Please take a look at The Counting House and let me know what you think.

http://www.mediafire.com/?rfsh5y45i2eii


Happy Carcking!

[Carcking]

No opinions on this? Really?

Even if I got a "Hey man, this sucks!" it would be better than silence.

Come on guys speak up!

[Dave]

I like it

I am intrigued and have gathered the bits necessary, I like the idea but haven't yet had a chance to try it.

I mostly only get to play two player and the count hasn't featured much in our games but this may see it come out to play more often.

[Carcking]

Hey, thanks Dave. That sounds encouraging.

We need to figure out if the end-game scoring of the gold coins is balanced. I didn't want them to be so valuable that you would rather hoard them than buy shares from the chamberlain, but I want them to be valuable enough to vie for.

Looking forward to your feedback!

[Dave]

when I play I'll try and note the score impact of the gold to see how influential, but my general idea is as long as a mechanic treats all players equally then a certain ammount of "balance" will be maintained, but I see your point about the choice to hoard or err invest.

have you playtested it yet?

and in the writeup there is a typo I think, you refer to placing meeples on farms and i think you meant features, haven't got the doc to hand so this is from memory, I think it was at the end just before final scoring.

[Dave]

just played the counting house

core tiles no other expansions, three players.

we felt the meeples were more free to move than the normal count, the coins "in this case" gravitated to one payer, I doubt this is typical, and they got 22 points end game.

consensus was that it was a good addition, but lent itself better to many 3+ players, and a bigger game of more expansions would have drawn more currency out of the city. no one paid to move the count or their meeples around, the coins were too much like treasure to pay out needlessly.

I think 3 points per coin is fair value.

and a good expansion.

Well done.

[Carcking]

and in the writeup there is a typo I think, you refer to placing meeples on farms and i think you meant features, haven't got the doc to hand so this is from memory, I think it was at the end just before final scoring.

You are correct here Dave. That should have said "features".

Thanks for catching it.

[Carcking]

just played the counting house

core tiles no other expansions, three players.

we felt the meeples were more free to move than the normal count, the coins "in this case" gravitated to one payer, I doubt this is typical, and they got 22 points end game.

consensus was that it was a good addition, but lent itself better to many 3+ players, and a bigger game of more expansions would have drawn more currency out of the city. no one paid to move the count or their meeples around, the coins were too much like treasure to pay out needlessly.

I think 3 points per coin is fair value.

and a good expansion.

Well done.

Awesome! Thanks for the report!

Why do you think the coins gravitated mostly to one player? If he got 22 points at game end - did he have more than that bought away from him during the game? or was it more of a balance?

"we felt the meeples were more free to move than the normal count" - not sure what you mean here. Can you elaborate?

We've only play tested it a couple of times with three players. Mostly it's been with only two players - my wife and I. It's very difficult to judge with just two players. We both tend to hoard I think but at least if we "steal" each others features they get some coin out of it. We do tend to try to get multiple followers on a valuable feature so if it gets bought away you get more coins out of it.

Thanks for trying it out!

[Dave]

we had red blue and black, and mid game after both opponents had  landed in carcassonne red had built the nicest current features, and promptly shared with both blue and black, black later bolstered a big city by having 2 meeples in it so no one tried sharing blue and black shared with each other as easier targets, and red moved a meeple round the city (which is the new found freedom I was referring to) to protect a completing feature and threaten to fight off intrusion.

I think the value of the features shared was greater than the worth of the coin by about double? the ten points on top was a good bonus on top for amassing the most treasure.
have you considered having an alternative scoring, instead of 3 per coin +10 to the winner, it could be the total number of coins held by a player looked up on that scale, like with the alternate trade tokens scoring?
gold   points
1         3
2         5
3         8
4        12
5        17
6        23
7        30
8        38
9        47
10      57
etc      etc

[Carcking]

This is an interesting concept. I don't think this type of scale has been officially incorporated into any fanspansions so this could be a good first official application. Anyone can correct me if that's not correct.

It's going to require continued play testing in any case. I'm looking forward to it.

[CKorfmann]

This is an interesting concept. I don't think this type of scale has been officially incorporated into any fanspansions so this could be a good first official application. Anyone can correct me if that's not correct.

I've never seen that scale used before.

[Dave]

there's a post about megacarc and how trade tokens are watered down with so many expansions 10 points becomes a drop in the ocean.

I like it because it rewards everyone, not just the majority holder.

[Carcking]

Yep, I recall the post. I was just saying that such a scale had not been "officially" incorporated into an fanspansions that I was aware of - so it would be unique if this were the first.

After thinking it over though I am now torn. I want there to be a free flow of coins in the game. I fear that if we over-value them the players will hoard. The scale inclines one to hoard because each one becomes exponentially more valuable to gain and hold. I think this would break my original concept.

Thoughts?

[Dave]

I see what your saying about the free fow of coins, I pegged the scale so that at first (for the first 3 coins) you get less than 3 points per coin.

it could promote a dilemma, is one more coin worth a share in that feature? am I going to get 4 or more coins by the end to make them worth lots or is it better to keep grabbing features?

I personally quite like the dilemma, the hoarder won't share many other features and may lose out this way, but on the flip side would have a small fortune in points by the end of the game.
But this is just my gold coins worth.

I think you will need to play test to know.
How many coins got into circulation in any of your games?
We only got about 7 in ours and shared between the players 4, 2, 1, the scoring of the coins could have been either way and would have made little difference, but I think this would no longer be the case in a big game.

you've got to spend money to make points

[Carcking]

We might be playing tonight with 6 or 7 players, including 4 who have not been introduced to this variation. I am going to introduce it as a play test and we'll see how it goes.

I'll take note of the distribution and flow, and end game tallies.