The Mine Shaft Gap

Today I handed over $5 because of Carcassonne.

The HR department at our workplace recently acquired a copy of Carcassonne for the staff room, on our advice after a casual discussion about boardgames came up. Mark and I were particularly insistent that the company not end up with a copy of Monopoly.
Now, the Foosball table and the Wii are currently more popular at lunchtimes than Carcassonne. But at least we’ve broken it out a few times now. And today Liming, Mark and I introduced a newbie. It was a good four-player game, but I’m not here to report scores, etc. Rather, to document what happened next, which was a result of a discussion with our newbie after the game about what you do if you can’t play a tile. I insisted that it would be an extremely rare case, perhaps “millions to one” - I don’t actually know the probability, this was just a casual and speculative assertion…

Anyway, our newbie said that after the standard start tile was played, all open segments of road could be joined in a loop and that would present an opportunity for an unplayable tile. Without thinking, I said that you wouldn’t have a problem with unplayable tiles, and offered, “five bucks says you can’t create such an unplayable scenario within the next 5 minutes…”
Doh. I think it took less than two. I’d forgotten about the 4-road tile!

After more consideration, another was offered featuring the full city tile.
Of course I’m not saying that there are not unplayable tile circumstances in Carcassonne - the rules even allow for them. I was simply challenging the likelihood of finding one in such a brief period.
I vow to no more make rash assertions about possible game outcomes!

Thanks to Liming for the pics, taken with his HTC Hero.