Dominating Carcasses

This week, we (yes, you heard right... WE. I actually made it this time) played a new game called Domaine. This is by the famed designer of Settlers of Catan, Klaus Teuber.
There are similarities: the guy likes random terrain, he likes soldiers which don't really fight (smacks of Canada, you might say), he likes home bases with minimum distances between them and finally, he likes resource hoarding. Still, in practice the similarities are only on the surface, and it all feels fresh and different enough that the game stands on it's own. Everyone tries to fence in little "domaines" and then expand them to include as many resources as possible (forests, towns and castles score points, mines supply money). Since everyone is competing for the same resources, soldiers are deployed to prevent being overrun (it's very simple formula: If you have more soldiers than the other player, you can grow your kingdom into the other's). The winner is the one who can score a set number of points first.
The scoring system is interesting: Your score is the total value of the resources you control, so if another player expands his kingdom and takes over a village you had previously controlled, that player gets the points AND YOU LOSE THEM.
Our first game was funny, because we were all learning and we discovered fairly early on that we all made some really dumb moves, and we were all paying for it. I would say we actually came close to "breaking" the system because we almost couldn't get anything going! In the end, it came down to a couple of really huge territories going to ?????, which won him the game.
Our second game was much better strategically, although I'm sure it will take many plays before we really get it down. In a tight contest, Shemp pulled a win with what would arguably be the oddest shaped territory we will likely ever see in the game.

To finish it off, we played two games of Carcassonne. The last game we played "Speedy Carcassone", giving very little thought to our moves and finishing it off in 15 minutes. The strangest thing: It was a lot of fun that way! I'm sure we'll be doing that again...

Oh yeah, and Shemp is 7h3 5uxx0r

Rating (Domaine):7