 I'm Root. I'm Scott. We are the host of Geeknize. It is a podcast about gaming. We've been doing this for 13 years. No. This is our 44th PAX panel. This is our, like, 390th panel at other conventions, not just PAXes. I'm old fucking in the grave now. And we're here today to not only teach you how to play Carcassonne, but to make sure you're playing the game right, and then we're going to make you all monsters. Yeah, and make the monsters fight each other. So, ostensibly, when you play a game, like a board game, you're here. Like, you're trying to win, right? Like, you're playing these games, and ostensibly, your goals are to have fun and win. And you might prioritize one over the other, and you can usually tell, depending on whether someone plays, like, Tigger's New Freighties or Munchkin. But, uh, are you really trying to win? Right. And how much are you trying to win? Are you putting your full mind, body, and effort into nothing but winning? Are you just, sort of, like, kind of trying to win, but also thinking about something, and also eating a drumstick? Well, checks down your phone. You don't quite understand that complicated story that happens at the end, so you're not worrying about it. You're just doing the parts of the game you know, and sort of ignoring that other thing, because it's too much work. So, I'm going to give you some real fair warning. And if you watch our YouTube video on how to win a game, it's even worse. If you do the things that we're talking about, and you really seriously try to win tabletop games, you're going to make tabletop games a lot less fun. Right. So a small example is Settlers, right? In Settlers, what's the fun part of Settlers? Trading! I'll give you one sheep to wood! Hey, hey, hey! I got some wood for your sheep. Right. The fact is, if you want to win at Settlers, you almost never trade, ever. You only trade if you're ripping someone off, and if everyone at the table is smart, you can't rip anyone off. No one ever trades, and there's more on top of that. Right. So, learning how to win a game, so you play with people who are trying to win and know the best way to win, the fun quality goes way down. And you'll also find that a lot of people don't want to play games with you if you're trying to win. Lots of bad things will happen, and that video goes into a death. We'll get into it here. But, we're going to go a little step further, because the real problem is that Carcassonne is a great game. I really like it. It was one of my first, like, real board games that I got into. But, base Carcassonne, not a lot of strategic depth once you start. Like, you can all play it optimally by the end of this event here. Or at least nearly optimally. Yeah, they look smart. I mean, we might be able to make an AI that'll win 1% more often than you, but if you do the things we're talking about, you're all going to win a much higher percentage of the time than you normally would. I actually only one-fifth if you will win, because it's a five-player game. So, we got to really briefly talk about the word game. Like, what does it mean to win a game? And the reason for this is that gamers, what do we love to do more than anything else? Let's argue about the rules and some arbitrary semantics. So, the word game, we're going to use the word ortho game instead. That is a word coined by Richard Garfield. You may know from such hits as Magic the Gathering. And he defined an ortho game, as opposed to just a game, like tag or patty cake or a peasant that I'm going to cook tonight for dinner, as a competition between two or more players with an agreed-upon set of rules and a method of ranking said player. Someone is the highest ranked. Right, and this is why Carcassonne is definitely an ortho game. It's a competition. There's two or more players. We agree on the rules after we're done telling you them. We'll agree on them. We don't agree on them yet. And there's definitely a method of ranking. Who has the most points? That is the winner. So, your only concern today is to be the highest ranked player. Now, if we structure the tournament, because there's a lot of people a little bit differently, like top two advance, you literally do not care if you are ranked number two or number one. You just do not want to be ranked number three or lower. Think about that very carefully. What is the real win condition? How are players being ranked? And how do you gain that system to get the benefit? A good example of this is we went to school at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I saw an RIT sweatshirt in the hallway. So, we were in the anime club for like five years and we... Hey, what's up? All right. So, RIT is peculiar in that there are not pluses and minuses in your grades. That changed. They ruined everything. So, when we were there... You also got rid of the quarter system. See how old we are? So, when we were there, a B plus and 89% had the same effect on your life as an 80%. Meaning, if you weren't going to get an A in a class, you shot for that low B. Because it was the same as a high B. A high B meant you could have played more Counter-Strike. The other thing is like if you got C's, you got the same diploma as someone with B's and your employer is never going to know or care about that. Right? What's the last time anyone asked for my transcript? Never? Actually, you know what? This got ruined because I got a new job and they wanted my RIT transcript. Well, I guess if you want to work at a big fancy company, over here. But if you want to make almost the same amount of money, I'd not have to go through all that. Yeah, anyway. So, another really important thing, and this is also heuristics, the best way to describe this without getting too deep into it is that a heuristic is the rules that a human uses to figure out what to do without calculating anything. And the best example of this is something called the gaze heuristic. Because the reality is, I can take some object here and I can just throw that. And I could just wing it out there at one of you. Do not. And the odds are, you could catch it. If someone throws an object to you, you can catch it usually if you want to. But how do you catch it? It's not like you're looking at it saying, aha, it is accelerating at this rate and it will reach its peak this many meters away from me. And therefore, you're not doing this calculus while the thing is flying and then it lands on the ground. That doesn't happen. Somehow, you're able to catch it every time without any conscious thought or math whatsoever. And it's even more complicated than that because if I throw an object at you, no one else here can actually predict what I throw it to until they catch it. You can only predict that you could catch it if it's coming to you. And the reason is, we don't do differential calculus in our heads. We instinctually look up at an object that is following a ballistic trajectory and we lock our neck at the angle that causes us to continue to be looking at it. We then move forward and backward to make sure that that angle remains constant. And if you do that, and you don't bump into a table, the object will guarantee it will hit you right in the face. So then you step back a little bit and you catch it. It's a simple rule that is not a full simulation of the world, but it's good enough to give you a better result than chess. Board games can be analyzed with maths. Simple board games can be analyzed by humans at the table with maths. We've played games where we can do a little bit of math and know exactly what to do when the game is stupid. And this is why a computer will often beat you even if you're really good at a game because they're doing the full math, calculating exactly where that ball is going to land, right? But your heuristic is a little bit fuzzy, but it's good enough to beat other people because they're not computers, hopefully. No cyborgs here, right? Yeah, that's not allowed. There's no augmentation. Well, I guess I mean, I'm slightly enhanced. Yeah, but no one's got a brain chip, right? No one's got a brain chip, right? We need to check everyone for performance enhancing drugs? I think we do. So in characteristics of games, which if you're here, you're probably not just interested in playing games, but also game design, characteristics of games by Richard Garfield and some other people. Rep Shaver book in the world. Is the best 101 primer to the reality of game design. It's a boring textbook. Yeah, but if you're interested in this stuff, one of the concepts it talks about is that in games, it's useful to break out two different kinds of heuristics. A directional heuristic is how you decide based on what you know about a game to do next. So a heuristic I might use in Shadowgate is when confronted with two dodgy looking things, I'll use the less dodgy looking one. It's not perfect. There is a reason and a way to go up this way, but that is a better rule than flipping a coin. Right, you're playing a game. You have to make decisions, right? It's like, well, I need a method for how am I going to decide. You play carcass, so on your directional heuristic, you're going to need some method by which you decide where to put the tile. Yep, should I put a guy on the tile? Where do I put the tile? How do you decide whether you put a meeple on it or not? And then how do you decide where to put the meeple, right? You're going to need some sort of thing that tells you what method you're going to use to make those decisions, just based on gut instinct or no, that's not a way to win gut instinct, right? No, you'll know you've developed a very powerful set of heuristics when you're playing games when you instinctually make good decisions and you don't even necessarily understand why at first. That is a fully evolved heuristic. And that, to other talk, gets into it more. Decisional heuristics is how you determine based on what you know how the players are currently ranked, who is winning. And as you know, this is not as simple as who's in first place at any given time. All right, as per the Mario card, right? So this is important, the positional heuristic of knowing who's in first, knowing who's in last, because that is one of the inputs into your directional heuristic, right? Where you put that tile depends on who's in first, who's in last. Whether you put a meeple or not, well, I would have put a meeple if ring was in first, but because he's not in first, I won't put the meeple. Now, some people might be saying, but that's our particular distinction, like they're both kind of the same thing. That is a ridiculously pedantic and pointless argument. That's why I had that definition of game before. All right, same kind of thing. But a level one heuristic in Mario Kart would be whoever's in first. A level two heuristic might be whoever's in second is actually in first, if there's enough time left for a blue shell to come, and it gets more and more complex from there. And to show this complexity, this is a page from that characteristics of games book, who is in first place in this game right now? Who's winning, A or B? Hmm. The answer to that question is really complicated and really interesting, and that is why heuristics are important. So now we're going to talk about Carcassonne specifically. All right, so Carcassonne is a game, I guess the theme of this game. Sorry if we don't care about theme for people who care about theme. I'm not sorry, we don't care about theme. Look, it's talking about monks and followers and thieves and farmers. No, there are meeples, there are going on tiles, there are things you put them on, you're scoring points. The fiction does not matter, you're here to win. Sorry. But yeah, here's how this game works. In the base set, there's going to be some number of land tiles. We don't know if our instruction manual matches those boxes. I believe it is still 72 tiles. Okay, there are 72 tiles. There is one of them that is dark on the back. That is the start tile. It will be face up in the middle of the table. All the other ones are light gray on the back. You shuffle them up. The tiles look kind of like this. They'll have things like cloisters. We're going to go through the terminology. There are cloisters. They look like a little house that's not connected to anything, except like a road. If they're on the tile, there won't be anything else on the tile, except maybe a little road. There are city segments. You can see that they're a big city that touches at least one edge. There are roads. If there's any schmutz on a road, that blocks it. And anything else on the tile is garbage flavor tech you can ignore, or it's something for an expansion that you're not playing with and you can ignore. One thing that happens in Carcassonne is there's so many expansions that try to milk people from their money, and most of those expansions are complete trash, like the catapult where you get meatballs in there. That's fun, but it's not good. Don't buy it. But the thing is, if you buy expansions, almost all of them come with more tiles. What you can do is play with those tiles. Add them to your Carcassonne. Don't change the rules. Don't use the expansion rules. Just get more tiles. Your game will be longer. It will last longer. The game will actually be more skill-based when you have more tiles, less randomness, and maybe more fun based on whether you like that or not. So, to actually play the game, that first tile will be out there. We'll arbitrarily pick a starting player. I recommend an app called Chwazi, C-H-W-A-Z-I for choosing your start players in any game, unless the game says otherwise. What you will do is draw a tile, one of these tiles. You will look at it, and then you will present it to all the other players. The rules are very clear about this. You must present it to everyone so that they may advise you as to what to do with that tile. I highly recommend you do not listen to what anyone says about what to do with these tiles. There may be times where you might take someone's advice, but, you know, think about who you're listening to. But they have the right to give you that advice. You cannot hide the tile from them while you think. Right. Also, definitely give people advice. Don't just sit there quietly. Put it there. Put it there. Put it there. Give people advice in a way that might convince them to do something more beneficial for you. So then you must place that tile somewhere where it lines up with whatever is on the other tile. Right. Roads gotta touch a road. Grass gotta touch a grass. Castle gotta touch a castle. You can't do that. You can't have a road going into a castle edge. Yup. It's pretty straightforward. And then, you may, if you wish, take one of your meeples. If you have a meeple. Yup. Your little dudes, if you have one. Gender neutral, they're just meeples. And you may place it on one of the features of the tile. That is your entire turn. And then the next player will do the same. And the next player will do the same. And you'll keep going until the last tile is placed. You do some final scoring. And the game is over. Whoever has the most points wins. Look how easy that game is. Yeah. And it actually is pretty straightforward. Once you place the tile, the places you can put a tile. If there is a city segment, you can place it on that city. If there is a road, you could place it on that road. So this tile, I could go on the city or the road. You can also put them in the farm, in the grass. They'll lay them down on the side and you stick them in the grass. Right. We put them on down in the side so there's no confusion as to where that meeple actually is. Also because farmer tiles who are laying down never come back up. They're there for the whole rest of the game. So that's why we lay them flat. And note that the road separates the farm. So both of these places are legitimate places to put a meeple. And a cloister, that house we talked about, you can put a guy just on the cloister. And it does a thing. Now note on this tile, you could just put it in the grass, around the cloister. Any feature that we have named, you can put a meeple on it. And if we haven't given you a name for that feature, you cannot put a meeple on it. Another rule. If there is a meeple of any color, not just yours, and it is in the contiguous feature created by a set of tiles, you cannot put a meeple in it with the tile. Right. So the tile on the left is already part of the board, right? The tile on the right is the tile you drew and you're adding to the board. So you made that city bigger by adding to it with your little tile there, right? You can't put your guys. There's already a red meeple in that city. You cannot put another meeple into that city. Not allowed. But you could put it on the tile, just put it on a different feature. Sure, you could do that. That rule is messed up often enough to where there was a very long reddit thread of someone who realized they'd been playing carcassonne wrong for like three years. So don't do that. So you can place meeples such that later they get connected. And we'll talk about that in a minute. That's how you know that you've become a monster. If you start to get that stuff going. Okay. So the point of this game is to get points and that might seem like a dumb thing to say. There are a lot of games where points are not the way you win. Right, now a lot of people when a game is all about points, they think, aha, the way to win is to get many points as possible. That is not true. You just need to get more points than everyone else, right? It doesn't matter if you got 100 and the second place has 99, you can win with 25 to 24. Good enough, right? Remember that definition? Just get more points than the other players. Don't try to just get maximum points. I mean, that's often the way to get more points than the other players, but not always. So during the game, remember those features we talked about, the cities and everything. If you complete them, meaning that they are finished, they're blocked off. I think I have a slide with an example of that. Yes. Then robes are worth one point per tile. Cities are worth two points per tile and two points per head in, which we'll talk about. Cloisters are worth one point per adjacent tile. We'll show you exactly what those all look like. So roads, really simple. If I finish a road, meaning, look, every endpoint of the road terminates in something. There's no hanging endpoint anywhere. Right. That final bottom right piece here, finish the road. It is worth four points because the road touches four tiles. Even though it touches this tile twice, that's not five points, that's four points. Four tiles of road, you own the road, it's finished, you get four points, you move up on the score track for spaces. Also, you remove your meeple. You take the meeple back into your supply. You have a limited number of meeples. Yep. Now you can use that meeple again somewhere else. Cities. Same deal. If the city is completely enclosed, the walls are all the way around that caucus zone. Daddy, two points. You get two points for every tile in that city and you get two points for every one of these little pennant-looking shield things. I don't know what they look like on those tiles. They'll be a thing that's different, that's on cities, it just means it comes like an extra tile. Like a little flag or heraldry or something like that. So two for six points for the city and then two more points for that for a total of eight points. Then you take the meeple back because the city's done. Cloisters score for every tile that is the tile you started on, one point, and any adjacent tile, orthogonally adjacent or diagonally adjacent. So when you get that guy in the cloister, you want to just surround it in any way possible, right? And if the ninth tile is placed and the whole thing is surrounded, you get all the points and then you can remove the meeple. So far, every one of these things we score, roads, cities, cloisters, you get your meeples back when you score them. They're all real simple, the basic ways. So then you keep going until the game ends. The end game scoring, which we haven't played a lot of these German-style games, there's usually like regular scoring and the end of the game scoring. The end of the game scoring is very similar. For every road that you have that you control, that you have a meeple on, you have a dude on, you get one point per tile, the same as if you'd finish it in the course of the game. You just don't get your meeple back because the game ended. So it's like, oh, you stranded your meeple, you didn't get to take them back, but hey, you still got the points. So you're good. Cities basically score at half points. You get one point per tile in the uncompleted city and one point per pennant in the uncompleted city. So if you want to complete the cities if you go into them, right? The road, maybe you can have an unfinished road, but you really want to complete that city to get double your point. Plissers score one point per Jason tile that is there. So this one would score eight points. It's only missing this one up here for the night. And the farmers, remember the farmers they lay down in the grass. You never get them back. People mess this up. You never get them back. Once they lay down in a farm, they are chilling in that farm until the end of the game. They might as well be dead. If you put all your meeples down in the farms, the rest of the game you're just putting tiles and doing nothing else. Now, like I said, there are a bunch of official standard ways to score this and it literally depends on what year the box of carcassone you bought is from. We're teaching you the one that is used at most of the carcassone tournaments. The one that we don't like. If you like the one that we don't teach, you are my friend and I love you because I think you are correct but we're not teaching that one because it's not the one people do. So the farms form continuous areas based on all the grass that they touch. So if I have a guy here, all this grass is one block. All this grass. Can be yours. Yes. What the hell? Except your ropa. Track some land. All belong here. So this darker people here, that whole area is the farm and the only thing you care about in a farm is roads, block farms, cities, block farms, but nothing else. It's grass, grass, grass. You get three points for every city that is in a farm or touching a farm that you control. If I have the most meekles in a farm and two sit, let's say I'm this guy and one, two, three cities touch it that are complete. I don't know if that one's completed. I know they have to be complete. Oh, it's not completed. They have to be completed cities. They can't be sort of half city. It's cropped off the other. Finish cities are three points each if they touch your farms. Even little tiny cities. Now for farms, just like with everything else, do you have a slide for it? Yeah. There's a more zoomed in example. So that's a farm. That's a farm. That's a farm. This one city is where three points to blue from this farm and three points to red from this farm at the end of the game. The same city could get multiple players points. Another thing that can happen, you might be saying this whole time because I mentioned whoever has the most meekles, but women's guy, you can only put meekles on a place that doesn't already have a meekle. If I put a tile down and I put a meekle on it and other tiles get played and eventually there's two areas that each have one meekle on them and then a tile gets played that connects those two areas, that's totally okay. So the blue meekle goes down. Imagine the bottom right tile with the cloister is not there yet. The blue meekle goes down. The yellow meekle goes down. They're both legal place because they're not in the same farm yet and then later on someone adds that cloister in the bottom right and now the farm of blue and the farm of yellow are connected. And now that's how you get two meekles into the same place. The same thing can happen with a city. It can happen with a road. It can happen with anything. But that's the only way to get multiple meekles into the same area is by putting them in separate areas and then adding tiles later to connect the two areas together. If you have the most meekles in a place you get all the points. If you are tied, everyone in the tie gets all the points. That is very important. So blue and yellow here both get what? The points for that one. Everyone gets three points for that because they're all reds in there too. Everyone's getting three. Everybody. So again, one point for road tile, two points for city tile. Let's finish. One point for closer tile when they finish. End of the game, one point for road, one point for city, one point for pennant, one point for closer tile, three points for city in a farm you control. Does anyone have any questions at this point? Anybody? Did we clear it? Pretty simple game. Yeah, it's not that hard. It's a pass-on plug. You guys are pros. So let's talk about how to be good at this game. Better get to learn how to sweep the leg. Okay. So this gets brutal already. If you're at the table, especially if you're playing with friends, but you're going to have to suss each other out based on social cues, if someone is doing poorly, take advantage of that. More importantly, if someone's staring at one part, like you're taking your turn and turn, turn, turn, and Scott's just staring at this one spot, really thinking, odds are he's going to do something with that spot. That's the area he's concerned about. People are often very good at telegraphing what they intend to do in games. Carcassonne is very ripe for paying attention to that, noticing that. So look at people's faces and also don't look at where you're going to do stuff. Look all around so no one can read you. If you draw a tile and someone's like, and they react a little bit, that tile's probably something they really need. You definitely want to make sure you do not put it in the place that they needed it to go. Don't always put a tile somewhere just because it looks beautiful at that spot. So, political, when we say Carcassonne is political, this is a very important concept in games in general. Game theory politics is not normal politics. A political game basically means that players interact with each other in a way to where one player could cause another player to win. The better way to put this is that all games that have more than two players and are not completely solitaire slash race-style games are political. A good example of this we talked about before is Settlers of Catan. If I trade with Scott once and Jo Jo Jo Shabbatou trades with Scott once, effectively Scott is at this sort of like plus one in the count of who's doing better at the game because interacting with another player in a trade is positive for both of you. This also means that if I am losing a game and I don't want Scott to win, I could just start doing things to hurt Scott because screw him and not make sure he doesn't win. There's really no way to avoid that in games and carcassonne is a political game. It's entirely possible that the best carcassonne player in this room will not win the tournament even if they try to because somebody else in one game says you know what, I'm going to lose and I'm just going to spend all my tiles making sure they don't win and then they don't win. Like when I made you draw all those yellow cubes on Thursday night? That's exactly what happened, yes. I didn't win. Actually I did win that game but I didn't think I was going to win. It's alright. Alright, let's get to the brass tacks. So this is an alternate there's a million expansions and I want to bring this up as a really like a holistic example of heuristics in this game. So in many expansions of carcassonne there's little meeples and there's one big meeple. I check those boxes. They do not have the big meeple. We're going to talk about the big meeple because we love the big meeple but it has like this stupid thing called the Abbott which I don't know what the hell that is so I guess we're not going to play with it. Yeah, we could use the Abbott as big meeple. We'll get back to that. We might use the Abbott as big meeple. The deal with the big meeple if it's in a game of carcassonne is that it counts as two meeples. Daddy two. It's otherwise just a meeple but it counts as two when it's on the board. So on this board red is in the city with a small meeple and that city is worth a zillion points. That is a game winning city right there. If that finishes red is just going to win. Green has their big meeple free and a regular meeple free and they drew this time. What do they do? They could put this tile here. Obviously you're not going to put it here because that just gives red a bunch of points. For nothing. Right? Why would you give someone else points this time? There is a stupid expansion or you would want to do that. No, we're not playing. You don't want to do that. So obviously the move is to put it there and put a meeple on it giving you a large chance of eventually having a tile go in the previous spot thus connecting your green meeple to the city with the red meeple and thus you and red would both get points. Yup. So the question is do you put your big meeple here or your little meeple here? And it depends on your positional heuristic. I have a slide for this later. I forgot. If red sucks and red is losing the game if red is so far behind you that you don't think they could catch up you might as well put your little meeple there because red wants to finish the city just as much as you do. You have doubled the chances the city will finish because two players are trying to find a tile that will connect this and complete the city. Right. In the game of Carcassonne there was 70 something tiles. I have a whole slide for this. There's 72 tiles and you're only going to get to play 18 if you have four player games. Your whole game will be playing 18 tiles. Or less. That's the only 18 things you're going to do in the whole game. The rest of the game is completely out of your control. Right. Absolutely nothing to do with that rest of the game. If you give red an incentive to put a tile in that spot you've just increased the chances of drawing that tile and getting it placed there by two. You've got 36 chances to have that tile put there because two players want it to happen, not one player. Conversely, if I put the big meeple there red definitely doesn't want to finish the city now because I'll get all the points they'll get nothing. In fact, they're likely to try to sabotage my attempt to finish that city. So, you really look at is red a danger to you or not? If they are a danger put the big meeple roll tanks roll. If they're not a danger put the little meeple share the points with the loser because you literally don't care about them they're losing. So, this is a general thing but a lot of people in tabletop games do not take their turn. Don't take a long time on your turn because one- We don't have all day it's packed let's go. But two, if your turns are slow that means that you're spending a lot of time calculating you're not building good heuristics. Forcing yourself to play faster will make you a better gamer it'll make you better at games but also in Carcassonne a lot of your decisions are arbitrary. It doesn't matter if you put the tile here or here or here they're all functionally the same. So think about that if you feel like two things don't matter don't agonize over it just put something just play rock and rock paper scissors it literally doesn't matter. Positional heuristics level one the points there's a point track we're gonna keep track of points when you score cities and robes and things along the time so the basic positional heuristics whoever's got the most points is in first place. But wait that can't be right because you said it's only level one there must be a level two. Level two likely farms who is setting up farms that are gonna score at the end of the game because those are not reflected here those only show up at the end. Right you might look here and be like aha I need to attack red red has so many points maybe on the board there's like four green farmers that are worth like 20 each right and you're not accounting for that and even though it looks like green is in last no green has a huge lead you need to attack them let red do whatever they want they're actually in last. So claimed points on the score track plus potential farm points at the end of the game and also potential other points from Unfinished Cities. Level three what's really funny is that this rule book in this box we got doesn't seem to have the tile breakdown but in regular Carcassonne usually it shows you there are two of this tile there are four of this tile there's one of this tile I'm not saying count tiles because you're gonna go insane but pay attention to the tiles that there aren't a lot of there is only one tile that looks like this if a city needs that tile to finish and that tile is already on the board it ain't finishing so you get to look at the board and get a rough sense of of the cities that are on the board that are not completed what are the odds that they're gonna complete does red have a whole bunch of cities that are like one tile away from scoring oh look at that giant city with like three green needles in it that's worth 40 points that's not reflected on the score track yet is it gonna finish if it's gonna finish I gotta give green like this many points to figure out if they're in first place or not oh but it's not gonna finish that tile's missing ah green's only gonna get this many points for that at the end of the game it's not that big a deal I can beat them so expanding mind wise the level four heuristic there is remember we said you can like sneak into someone else's city by cleverly placing tiles and farms you need to not just look at the farm someone's got you need to look at is someone's positioned in such a way that they could connect into a big farm right at the end of the game you're gonna look at the points that are available for snatching and the likelihood that they will be snatched there might be a big empty farm that nobody's claimed yet that's worth like 20 points because there's a whole bunch of cities connected to it or Scott might be in that farm and I have two meebles in unlikely places and a path that I might be able to connect him into this farm before the end with your 18 tiles yeah directional heuristics what do you do so one maximize points per tile points per tile is the thing you need to think about you play at most 18 tiles in this game we're probably gonna group into groups of five maybe even less tiles every tile you play has to get you points or a point equivalent which we'll talk about in a minute so think about that number you'll see this big battle of tiles you don't have that much input don't start giant sprawling cities they will never finish do things you can finish always have this number burned into your skull at least have one road one city one cloister that you're working on at any given point that way if you draw a tile of that type you got a place to put it they get you a point right if you draw a road tile and you don't already have a meeple on a road there's your opportunity to start a road that way if you draw another road tile you've got a road to add it to right if you're only doing castles only and ignoring roads and whatever then all these road tiles you draw it's like what are you gonna do with them you want to have meeples working on all the different areas right to score points in all different areas but because the tile draws random you want to be able to get points with whatever you happen to draw because who knows what it's gonna be so here's the situation what should red do here red's got this road tile green and blue are in a game-winning monster city if blue and green finish this city it's probably game over for everyone else so what should red do red in this case should actually be a dick right red memorized all the tiles in the game they know that the tile to finish that city is already played or does not exist even better we'll talk about I got slides about tile liberties you'll see this is gonna start to get deep in a little bit but I have reduced the liberties of finishing the city I have made the city more difficult to finish and even better where does red put their meeple on that road don't put it on that road that road ain't gonna finish road's no good that meeple's gonna be trapped on there if you got a ton of meeples man it looks a little late in the game there's a lot of tiles there if you got a ton of meeples yeah stick it on the road but maybe I would probably stick it on this farm it's always important if I put it here then it only takes me three tiles to connect that farm around here into that far and it looks like it loops around like big ol' farm down there maybe so once again if someone sucks if someone's losing don't make fun of them don't squeeze them like don't be a jerk outside of the game don't be a jerk in real life but be a jerk in the game and steal their points share your points with the people you cannot hurt you this is why you need to position your heuristic if someone's lower than you or not in first place you wanna share points with them to bring both of you up it's if it's a five player game and me and rim share an enormous city with each other guess what we've just increases our chances of winning from 20% to 2 out of 5 right or 50% there's only two of us left alright in a four player game if you've watched the Omegathons that other packs is often times there'll be a situation where like the last place player gets eliminated from the tournament or stuff like that if all the players in a game but one collaborate on a city together they have all increased their chances of winning because now red definitely cannot win the game every one of these people has an increased chance of winning the game together form a coalition with another player or two other players as long as it's not all the players in the game because that's stupid obviously and you just eliminate this person attack only one knock him out of the game one less person to worry about you don't want to form this coalition necessarily a blue is already kicking ass do you want to do this when red is kicking ass that way it's like oh red you thought you're so good guess what now you can't win it's one of us three we just increased our winning chance from 25% to 33% or expanding mind style you form one of these very early in a game with the person who you think is the least clever at the table King make make a king but you're the vizier be opportunistic ooh the app the app is really good by the way yeah the app is really good if you got a tablet I recommend so I drew this road title let's say and I'm green so I got this nice road going I get to stick it on this road and keep it going that's a nice road but roads were one point no matter where I put it we're not playing with any weird rules I should put it here and put a meatball on it because there's already a stub of a road hanging out so I'll get two points for placing this road if I put a meatball on it the only reason I wouldn't do that is if I'm almost out of meatballs the other thing is it might affect your chances of finishing this little city here but it's not going to do that here anyway so if you're really worried about finishing that city maybe go over here to get your one point leave no openings anywhere if you play a tile and you leave something like this on the board whoever goes after you is going to get two extra points if they place a road there never ever ever put something on the table that someone else could get points from minimize the exposure everywhere every turn when someone's turn starts they should look at a board full of garbage right look there's also this awesome city tile hanging off the edge with a banner on it right? it's like just giving that away no you can put your meatball on that even better leave no openings pick up instant points so see how blue's on here if you lay a tile on a tile like this that's a road and a road that are both in cab you can score it immediately so you literally play the tile put the blue meatball on the completed road that you just completed score it take your two points and pick your meatball back up two points per tile ain't bad so if you can do this do it don't feel bad about it now we're talking about liberty instead of getting the city here nice little two points two tile savings worth four points if I finish it there are a whole bunch of tiles that can be played to either finish the city or continue the city so that's great a lot of options which means the odds of you drawing one of those tiles to add to that city is a good chance but there's a danger here either of these tiles could be placed to reduce my liberties if either one of these gets placed next to my city then one of these edges loses a liberty there is now a specific feature that has to be on the tile I use to continue building my city or to finish my city so by putting tiles next to other people's features you increase the complexity of what they need to do to finish them and decrease the likelihood that they will finish them a good way to protect this is make long cities try to get the edges the free edges of things you're building away from other tiles because the longer you get the harder it is to pull this nonsense whenever possible hurt other people the reality is you don't get to play that many tiles and it is way easier to screw someone else out of points than it is to get points for yourself if I put a tile that denies Scott's six points from a city that is way better for me than getting measly two points imagine if blue finished this city it would go from currently two points if he's stuck there at the game end to two, four, six points if they just finish it with a little end cap that's a difference of four points four points for one tile holy crap because taking away four from the first place player is as good as getting four for you because it's not about how many points you get it's about being at first and again if you're playing this to hurt someone then odds are less likely that they're going to put a tile here with no people on the road hang out somewhere else on the farm or not at all it's as often valuable to play a tile that hurts someone else even if you don't score anything on it because points taken away from anyone ranked higher than you are points for you even if you put no people on that tile it's already a four point play alright a very effective strategy in base carcassonne is to use these angle cities of which there are many to build these sort of closed structures that can be finished with all the tiles that are similar to each other look there's no liberties to be hurt and there's a lot of tiles that can fit up here if I take the same two tiles and I rotate this one to make a line now there's two different places that I can attack it from because I've made these adjacencies that make it easy to reduce liberty so that structure is very powerful if you see another player doing that try to build a tile up here to then get in and mess it up and also since four tiles are going to be placed between your current turn and your next turn if you're playing five player well, you'd be in trouble if they cooperate against you another very important heuristic for you is the idea of minimum tiles to completion any city you are in you need to think about what is the minimum number of tiles it would take to finish and score that city so with this city the minimum is two I can put one here, put one there the easy way to count it is look for the number of edges on the city number of edges means number of things you have to cap off and that's where it's complicated let's take this guy here that has three edges the minimum time to completion or minimum tiles to completion is actually only still two because a tile can go here that will cover two edges at once but there is reduced liberty there's less likelihood of getting that specific kind of tile but if I get that tile good times any tile that has this sort of like line arrangement meaning it has two ends maintains your minimum tiles to completion while just adding points even if you never finish it because they screw you over adding that to your city just gives you two points because I got a banner on it so why not? yeah it doesn't make it any harder for you to finish two point play, two point play is pretty good the nature of the game and the way roads are structured because of just the way the tiles look it is very likely that farms will be separated from other farms in ways that make it very difficult to connect them so in general you need to think about roads that curve inward that may close loops tend to be more open to farming they tend to make more things connect to the farm because the inside of the road is not a good farm but the outside of the road oh that's a hella good farm the inside of the circles this area the outside is everywhere else so if this was going straight and curving up this way you'd see it cap the farm off so look for closed type loops and things like that that is how to figure out what the big farms are going to be cloisters with roads on them are magic they are one of the few ways to take a road which is going to separate these two farms and link them together it is very often useful if you can place this cloister tile with the road end on it at the end of a road and people aren't already farming stick your farmer there forget those cloister points cloisters are not the way to win this game they're just bonus points don't worry about that do this now you control both sides of this road that is a big deal in this game in a cloister you think best case scenario is going to be nine points a farm that has just three cities in it is nine points because you might think oh I played this one tile it was nine points per tile no no no you played that tile and you went in the cloister that is two points per tile to start you only get more points if more tiles get placed here unless all their players place tiles next to this cloister you're only going to get another point for that tile if you take another tile and place it there that's deluding your points per tile you're going to have to place all your future turns of which there aren't going to be many around that cloister so if some jerk places a cloister don't put tiles next to it if you got a tile and you can't use it and you got to dump it don't stick it here look there's only two places I can put this I can put it here or I can put it here you might as well put it here because that way this does not have an extra not only an extra tile that's worth more points connected to it but it also caps off one of these ends it decreases the minimum tiles to completion if you stick it here it has a minimum three tiles to completion and it doesn't have an extra point I know we keep saying this you will play a tile and then a whole bunch of other people will play tiles if someone else starts making a big city a few of you just need to stop them from building it and you're all good hurt other players I keep saying it because it is way easier to do that than it is to get points there is one thing against hurting other people right you got a more than two player game going on right you got me, rim and other person if rim is the one who spends his tile attacking other person and I don't have to spend my tile attacking other person that's good for me remember politics? that is politics it's the balloon popping game we play a game where everyone in this room has three balloons and on your turn you pick someone and pop one of their balloons we're literally voting on who wins the game political games are effectively vote who wins carcassone is the same way if I hurt Scott I'm at minus one in some arbitrary metric because I wasted the tile to hurt Scott and Scott's at minus one because I did an action to hurt him if I hurt Scott and Scott hurts me and I hurt Scott and Scott hurts me we have done the opposite of king making we're like piss boy making we're making the bottom we're not another person who wins we're just giving them points so convince other people to hurt people and get points for yourself whenever possible jump in on a city steal points from other people share the load I'm moving a little quick here because I want to get into the actual game but there are tiles that will let you break these shades I don't think that's going to be in that box I think there's one of those levels really? that'd be crazy here's a very interesting here so my expansions are good do you get tiles like that? try to predict where the farms are going to be so remember how roads are worth one point per tile and cities are worth two points per tile and remember how we also said you want to play a tile that scores immediately and pick your meeple right back up a city like that is worth four points you can get four points by placing a tile like that there so what tends to happen in base carcassonne is that as soon as someone starts putting some small cities in the area because the small city tiles have other small cities on them all these small cities will cluster together if a city is 20 tiles or two tiles it's worth the same three farmer points this is one baller farm so get in early on farms that look like this kind of pattern is going to emerge also there's a baller farm on the other side too because cities got two sides and look this is very trivially connected in here you want to use all your meeples all the time but not right away right? if you put all how many meeples in it six maybe? I think so I forget some number right if you just put all your meeples out in your first six turns and you don't have any the next tile you draw you're gonna have to put somewhere bad and someone else is gonna be able to capitalize on it and take points from it so on your turn you always want to have at least one meeple free because you always want to have the ability to put that meeple out so if you put a meeple on a road and you're starting to run low finish that road instead of starting a new one so you have a free meeple for the next turn but at the same time you don't want to have a whole bunch of meeples off the board because then those meeples aren't working and getting you points so you want to get them all on the board all working except one because they'll all be free and then at the very end ideally you put your last meeple on the last turn to maximize the point because basically the meeples are like little point mountains you want to get them all working but always be able to move them around so if you ever run out of meeples or you have meeples left after your last turn you did mess up you messed something up at some point there are very rare exceptions when placing your last meeple on a thing are the right idea I do not think you will run into those situations if you think it's that situation we'll talk we got our last slide we got our last bit there neither of these tiles are in the game the witch hat and the inverse witch hat witch hat inverse witch hat you'll find that the weird tiles in Carcassonne have names among people who play Carcassonne a lot we made up those names I've never heard of them no Amber's friends made up those names okay sure they said them I've never heard anyone in PAX say them no so that was our group but other groups have had similar names some of them are quite raunchy and I'm not going to share them here but they exist the point is when you're playing the game look at what kinds of tiles are really common like road road that curves city that's at an angle and pay attention to what tiles are not common or are weird like angle city with an angle road coming into it there's only one of those jerks these are not in the game you're playing these are not in the game these are the only good expansion to Carcassonne Inns and cathedrals this is a must have Carcassonne expansion if you're serious about Carcassonne you buy it you love it you play it a lot get this expansion and only this expansion it adds a bunch of tiles to the game and it adds the Inns and the cathedrals which are actually both really terrific because we've basically taught you other than some of the math like literally nearly perfect play like there is not much you can do other than the things we have said that can make you better at a game where you at most have one fifth of the actions in the game if you add this expansion all these do really briefly they're not in the game if that's on a road that road scores double but only if it finishes it's worth zero at the end of the game if you didn't finish it this an extra point per tile and an extra point per pennant and a city that finishes and zero points if the city doesn't finish meaning the vast majority of the time this is placed in someone else's city to ensure they never finish it and they get zero points oh you're building a giant city let me put a little cathedral in there now the church takes all the points if these tiles were in the tournament we're about to play this talk we gave would literally have to have been twice as long to talk about the strategies also what do you got? I never mind completely forgetting so remember to talk about herd other players in games in general you need to convince other people to do your dirty work for you so in games like chrono knots they don't play chrono knots okay I'm not going to use the example then but there's a good example from chrono knots in civ 5 civilization if someone's going to win the game someone's running away with the game and they're going to win like on their next turn or they're going to score a big thing don't do anything to stop them take your turn first and then whoever goes after you be like Scott if you don't play this tile he's going to win the game never fall into here to do this and never point it out until you already took your turn I can't do anything it's not my turn you have to do it before the game ends this is the advice part that we talked about you should be giving advice you have to show the tile before you put it so everyone can talk about it that's when this part happens also don't be the last person to go before the person is winning so that way you're not forced to do the thing and luckily you're already all seated and I don't think we'll see what happens when we actually start the games but when you start to get good at the games there are many games for convenience just go clockwise Carcassonne doesn't matter too much but other games matter a lot the turn order but it does matter in Carcassonne we're getting to the point to our chair order actually like that will make the difference like that 1% difference when you're all playing perfectly and that is just random after that so El Grande the big which is in the classic tabletop area you should play El Grande it's a fantastic, fantastic game and you're going to learn brutal when we played this game we would stand around the table I'd sit down and I'd sit down over here you know I don't think so I'm going to get up and go to the other side so we're pacing around the table for like 5 minutes are you out who's going to sit where are their friends like Jesus really alright we're randomly determining seat or sitting order for the rest of our lives now because your children can't just sit down and play a game but then we randomized the seating order like well I guess so and so will win it matters a lot in other games and in Carcassonne it matters so in general in games that use this convenient clockwise thing you want to go before people who are better than you and after people who suck because someone who sucks at Carcassonne is going to leave a nice fat city hanging off that you can just jump on to someone who sucks at Carcassonne is going to leave opportunities open they're going to make poor decisions someone who's good is going to see what you're trying to do and hit you off you want to go before the person who's good not after and last but not least the easiest way to win this game is to cheat and I just want to point out that is actually one of the only rules of packs you can be kicked out of packs for cheating it's possible that's why I'll pass I haven't seen it happen but it's gonna happen I've never seen it happen don't cheat don't cheat I don't have one last promise to you once we start the tournament we're going to get these games out and start playing at any point if any one of you wants to make a deal with the devil you can do this any time you can do this as many times as you want raise your hand one of us will come over we'll look at the situation we'll tell you exactly what we would do in your position but we will explain why to everyone else at the table I have probably played Carcassonne hundreds of times dude man I can't even know how many times yeah especially because the app I play it when I'm booping so yeah it's not too bad but I think I have like a 70-80% win rate among skilled players at base Carcassonne Scots also like you don't lose too often Scots also like 60-70% so promise the advice we give you will be good why would we give you bad advice we're not in the tournament and if we come to the table and we give advice and someone disagrees and you're right I'll give you a prize of some kind that would be amazing the only prize we have is the whatever good luck have fun we're going to figure out how to make this tournament happen right now if you don't want to stick around for the tournament I highly recommend you grab one of these because the videos of all those other talks we've given about other games or generic winning are on YouTube if you're going to stay at least to you in the course of Carcassonne alright so we have it looks like one to here are 10 boxes of 5 players each so we can have 50 people we can have 50 people so let's make 10 tables of 5 1, 2, 3, 8 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10