The Tile-Laying Game and the Farmer Problem
The tile-laying game with the walled cities and the roads and the little wooden people is the one we come back to most. It is quick to teach, it fits the table, and it generates exactly one argument per evening, which is always about the farmers. For anyone who does not know it: you draw a tile, place it so the edges match, and may put one of your wooden figures on it as a knight in a city, a thief on a road, a monk in a cloister, or a farmer lying flat in a field. Fields score at the end for each completed city they touch, and because fields merge as the map grows, a farmer placed in round three can end up worth 30 or 40 points in round forty, or nothing.
Tonight’s first game was decided entirely by this. The player in blue dropped a farmer early into what looked like a small field, two other players later built four cities on its edge without noticing they were connected, and the final count gave blue 42 points from one figure. Final score 118 to 76 to 71 to 64. The second game, by common consent, used no farmers at all, and finished 84 to 79 to 77 to 70, which is a far better spread and took about ten minutes less.
We talked it through at the end. Nobody wanted to drop farmers permanently; the field game is where the strategy lives. But the hidden-merge problem is real at a dim table where nobody can see the far edge of the map. The house rule we adopted, three votes to one:
- Farmers may be placed only after the twentieth tile, so the shape of the fields is roughly visible by then.
- Any player may ask at any time which fields are connected, and the asking does not count as a turn.
- A farmer scores at most 24 points, regardless of how many cities the field touches.
We will try it for a month and see. The dissenting vote came from blue, for obvious reasons. Tea was strong, the biscuits were the oat ones, and the lamp bulb needs replacing before next week because the brown roads and the green fields were hard to tell apart by ten o’clock.