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So Essner got me this Carcassone variant, New World. It’s… well, I don’t know if it’s better than original Carcassonne? But it certainly does add interesting elements.
For one, having to build off of one edge does add some interesting elements to the strategy. In normal Carcassonne, you can go just about anywhere to, you know, ignore what other players are doing, if you’d like. You can do no such things in this one. Everything is built off of this starting “coast” area, which makes all the play be bunched up a bit, which is interesting, though not completely game-changing.
The main thing the game adds, though, are these “Surveyors.” These little pieces move “westward” each time something is completed. If your little settler piece is in the row of a surveyor when you complete anything, you get an extra 4 points for each Surveyor in that row. That can get a pretty huge boost in points. On top of that, if you have any settlers on pieces that are uncompleted when Surveyors move past that row, you have to pick them up. (This doesn’t count “trappers” which are the farmers in this game. Those stay until the end of the game, like always.) You get no points. This is the mechanic that I think could really mess with the game right here, and although I haven’t played enough to completely gauge it, it seems to strongly punish people who try to make large towns and it makes “farms” (which are the monasteries in this game, named farms for MAXIMUM CONFUSION) much, much less lucrative than in the main game. In normal Carcassonne, there is almost NEVER a reason not to put a guy on a Monastery. In New World, I can totally see putting a settler on a farm often being a bad and kind of pointless choice, as it’s often hard to complete monasteries quickly. This game also makes mini-cities potentially maximum spiteful, too, which is always good. Spite is always good.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll give it a more thorough playthrough soon, but that’s just kind of my first impressions. I think the main thing I’m going to get out of this game, though, is that I’ve added so many tiles through expansions to original Carcassonne that it is no longer the quick and fun game it originally was, and is now much more involved. Since this game is back to that original, smaller number of tiles, it would be great for those times when you have the tile-game itch, but want it to run quicker. If it manages to fill that niche, I’m all for it.