Gaming With Grandma - 74

My mother (AKA Grandma) dropped by for her regular Saturday morning visit and game session. Today I decided to try one of the games I'd recently picked up in a math trade - Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers. I've played the original Carcassonne several times before but this was my first experience with Hunters and Gatherers.

Hunters and Gatherers is part of the popular Carcassonne series but instead of being set in medieval France it's set in the stone age. Players build a prehistoric landscape with tiles depicting forests, rivers, lakes and meadows. They then send out members of their tribe to hunt, gather, fish and establish fishing camps. It includes many of the familiar mechanics from Carcassonne but with a few new options.

A close up of the board in play - I was green and Grandma was yellow

As my wife was at work and my daughters Maddie and Georgia were busy watching Alvin and the Chipmunks on DVD, that left just my mum and myself to play Hunters and Gatherers.

I quite enjoyed Hunters and Gatherers as a two-player game. I liked the incentive to close off forests containing gold nuggets to be able to take a bonus tile. I liked the scoring of rivers better than the scoring of roads in the original Carcassonne. I liked the sabre-tooth tiger mechanic of eating a deer in the same meadow. In fact, there were a lot of little things I liked that have made me wonder if I really need the original Carcassonne and expansions (the River (included in the base game) and Inns & Cathedrals) in my collection.

In our game this morning I was able to grab all the points for the largest hunting area (36) by having one more hunter than Grandma in the same meadow. My huts scored 16 to her 13. I went on to take the win with 117 points to her 73.