Thawmped at Carcassonne

I am not totally sure how to spell "thawmped" but that's what I was: beaten down. Beaten down by my own stupidity, the clever play of my father-in-law, and some lucky drawing on my father-in-laws part.

The game we played was Carcassone. It was a Sunday morning after church; early church; earlier than I prefer to awaken on a weeked. Anyway, my inlaws were going to be leaving soon, and I decided to get one more quick game in with my father-in-law before he left. We had played the night before, and he had barely beat me. So, I thought I could win this round for sure.

Carcasonne is a tile-laying game in which you build (or connect, depending on how you wish to think of it) roads, cities, and fields. You lay your pawns, called meeples, when you lay a tile and collect points based upon how you laid them.

For more info on Carcassone, you can watch the You Tube videos at the bottom of this blog's left column. Even better, you can play it at games.asobrain.com. There it is called Toulouse.

I played a few tiles poorly, helping my father-in-law more than myself by expanding his roads or completing cities he was in with me but that I had not claimed yet (by adding more guys). Then I thought I had finally got back in the game: There was a big city we had both gotten into (in which case you share the points and I needed to make sure I got the points and he didn't, which means I needed more meeples in the city than him). I placed a tile so that it would have to connect to the city and would be easy to place the tile. I put my meeple on that city and smiled. I just had to connect my meeple's tile to the city before my father-in-law could block me. The very next turn, my father-in-law placed a tile that that killed the city. It was dead in that there was no possible way to complete it anymore. "F-ing F-ers" I yelled. I didn't cuss. I said it just like it is written there, but I guess I shouldn't have played. It was early, I hadn't napped, and sleepiness made me angry. Of course, it didn't help that he beat me by over 50 points.