Kings and Barons Invade Carcassonne

Yay! Content overflow right now, but tough to argue with more Carcassonne. So much easier to maintain and score than the physical board game.

So does the Trogdor expansion already exist?

I still play this for hours singleplayer but I gave up on the multiplayer because it's not done very well. As is the case with many 360 games, just setting a game up can be problematic at times, with games becoming full or vanishing as you try to join them, and in Carassonne you get dumped back to the main title screen when that happens (and it happens a lot), forcing you to go back through the menus and try again.

Worse, if your connection to the hosting player isn't very good then the game is laggy. Just moving the pieces can take several seconds which is ridiculous. (WTF is there a round-trip communication with the server just to move a piece around before placement? That should obviously be client-side, with asynchronous updates sent to the other player(s) until you actually place a tile and end your turn.) That lag would be frustrating on its own but it completely breaks the game because there's usually quite a short time limit in which you have to take your turn. When you spend most of that 20 seconds (or whatever it is) fighting with the piece trying to get it into the right place, then have it auto-dropped into an unwanted position, it is absolutely fucking infuriating.

Obviously playing real people is a lot more interesting than playing the computer AI but I gave up on it and just play the computer. I still really enjoy the game but man I wish they had tried harder. :-|

It also seems cheap to me that they're selling these add-ons one-by-one. I guess the same was the case for the real game but that doesn't make it right. I figured they'd release add-ons but hoped they'd do it in packs rather than one-by-one. It's not a huge amount of money but it does seem like they're taking the piss a bit. (Hardly anyone ever used the River I expansion that was built into the basic package, too, so I wonder how much these new sets get used and whether they're worth the money?) Still, it's not as bad as Tetris Splash which tries to get you to pay money to add different fish and backgrounds for them to swim in behind the board. (Very small amounts of money but, honestly, WTF?)

The article above makes it sound like you get bonus points in-game just for buying the expansion. Which I'm pretty sure isn't the case. :-)

Does this correspond to any of the existing expansions for the "real" boardgame? It doesn't sound familiar. Or is it new AI players?

Bah, I was really hoping they would do Inns and Cathedrals or Traders and Builders next. :( This expansions is not regarded as a very good one. I guess it was easy to implement.