This week John and Colin joined me for some gaming fun. We cracked open my copy of Thurn and Taxis for a couple games and finished with our typical closer - Carcassonne.
The first game of Thurn and Taxis I did a very good job of getting my houses down and getting carriages, but I didn't focus on getting points from the different territories. In fact the only one that I did well on was Baiern where I got the first one. I really thought that I was far behind and trying to play catchup, but I decided to close the game by putting my last house on which allowed me to be the only player with the final carriage. I ended up with a solid win. The one caveat was that Colin forgot he wouldn't get another play if I ended it and he could've put more of his houses down and got the final carriage which would've made for a closer game.
In the second game John and I started by putting our houses in several territories and Colin focused on Baiern. Afterward he conceded that he should have closed out sooner so that he could advance his carriage values instead of following in our tracks on the 7 length route. Other than that things were close between us through most of the game. Towards the end we started getting into the habit of using the Administrator to dump the city cards since we started getting more specialized in our desires. Unfortunately near the end of the game I was trying to get Salzburg to complete the orange area and I used the Administrator and wound up with two of them (if only I'd known that the next card was one!) in the city list. But after starting my route I need two turns with the Postal Carrier to get to 5 houses and another turn to play either two more our to use the Cartwright to get the final carriage. Unfortunately, John only needed two turns to end the game, which got him the win over me by 9 points.
In Carcassonne Colin is almost always strong with the farmers. Often times I ignore that and try going after all of the cities. This time I did put some of my meeples in the field only to have them overwhelmed by Colin's farming focus. Fortunately I was involved in the completion of both citadel cities (one with Colin, the other with John). Between those and a number of late game point sharing with John I was able to hold off Colin's 60+ point end-game surge by 9 points for the win.
