World Team Carcassonne Online Championship
2025
Week “One”
Dear friends of the Mighty Meeple,
The first duels were played, bringing sweat, tears, joy, excitement, smelly odeurs, funny streamer faces and interesting facts!
- Thailand was the only one of the 3 debuting teams to withstand the pressure and take home their first victory.
- Until this year, Germany was the only team to have won their first match in every WTCOC edition. Alas, their impressive streak ended this week.
- Four teams had a ‘bye’ in this first round.
- The highest points scored in a game in Round 1:
- 154 Glovir (Por)
- 151 203club (Chn)
- 147 Mikhail-rus (RCP)
- 146 bazilyuk (Ukr)
- The game with the highest accumulated score in Round 1:
- Glovir (Por) vs bazilyuk (Ukr): a whopping 300 points!
- Both players reached a higher score than the highest score of the whole 2024 edition (144)!
- By the way, the highest accumulated score in WTCOC’24 was 269. In this year’s tournament, however, there were two games in the very first round where the accumulated score was higher than that .Apart from the 300-point game mentioned above, the other one was in a game between 203club (Chn) and Eter (Hun) (151-134).
- The game with the lowest accumulated score in Round 1:
- mtuu (Pol) vs misozak (Svk): 123
- The lowest winning score:
- Chini_GT (Gua): 66
- The lowest score:
- 37 but misozak (Svk) still managed to win their duel!)
- There were some very impressive high scores that weren’t enough to win the game. Here are the top 3:
- 146 bazilyuk (Ukr)
- 134 Eter (Hun)
- 126 Lolinho19 (Uru)
- 6 games ended in a draw. Curiously, two of them ended in 115-115, and two of the 6 draws were in the USA vs Czech Republic match.
- 2 games were lost by time.
- Finland didn’t win a single match during their debut last year. But… now they’ve kicked off their tournament with a Bang! That blasting 5-0 win will certainly motivate Otto’s troops.
- Another one of last year’s newcomers, Croatia, also started this year with an impressive 5-0 win. That puts a lot of pressure now on Vietnam, last year’s 3rd newcomer, who didn’t play in the first round. These wins will definitely inspire this year’s newbies.
- A total of 4 matches ended with 5-0 scores.
- Although FabianM_be (Bel) lost his duel 2-0, he only lost by 1 point. How tight can a duel be?
- The Round 1 defeat of Alexey_LV (Lat) means that his 8-duels-long winning streak (which he started during WTCOC 2023 and continued through WTCOC 2024) has come to an end. Two other players have continued their winning streaks: should (Jap) just won his 10th duel in a row, and Salva3xz (Col) now has 9 consecutive duel wins.
Did you know that…
- This week the reigning Carcassonne World Champion (senglar from Catalonia) faced the reigning Azul World Champion (Sunny369 from Hong Kong). Senglar prevailed 2-1. Will Sunny369 request a rematch…playing Azul?
- Due to unexpected circumstances, JinaJina stepped in as the 5th player for Belgium’s match vs Taiwan…and had to play while celebrating a friend’s birthday at the La Chouffe brewery 😅.
The issue of the starting player
As you know, the novelty of this year’s Team World Championship is that the selection of the starting player for each game is completely randomized. This introduces an element of unpredictability, with some players potentially starting all (two or three) games in a match. Naturally, this raises the question of whether a player starting every game could gain an unfair advantage. (On average, the starting player won approximately 54% of the games last year.) In the previous edition of WTCOC, the theoretical maximum for a team’s starting player ratio in a match was 66.6%, but this year, as shown, we are seeing even higher percentages, with some teams experiencing significant imbalances. As we are still in the early stages of the tournament, with only the first round completed, the available data is limited, and it is too early to draw definitive conclusions. However, this preliminary analysis serves to highlight the occurrences of highly unbalanced starting player distributions and provides some insight into the frequency with which they appear.
The data from the first round showes that teams that started more games won their matches at a higher rate, but interestingly there was no such correlation in the pairings where the starting percentage was the most unbalanced.
At the end of the tournament, once we have a larger sample size, we will revisit this analysis and provide more comprehensive insights into how the starting player may influence match outcomes.
Mr. Curiossonne presents…
Weekly Records:
- Germany’s Mermadin has already matched last year’s longest road (16 points) at table #662686360 on turn 31 (move 63)
- Mariaaf (Uru) and Mikhail-rus (RCP) jointly scored a 50 point city (that’s only 2 points shy of last year’s record) on turn 62 (move 122) at table #665013225
- 30 point fields were popular this week: scored by GUN007 (Thi) at table #662078290, Glovir (Por) and bazilyuk (Ukr) at table #664607312, Smile- (Ukr) at table #664610828, and senglar (Cat) at table #664853160
- Eter scored 42 monastery points at table #664502017 (3 complete and 2 incomplete monasteries)
Mr. Curiossonne’s investigations:
Mr. M. Curiossonne will be needing your help. He’s eager to know about any rituals our readers might have before playing an important duel. So, if you walk around your table 8 times counter clockwise, always wear the same red underwear or go to the church to have your bad karma cleared, please get in touch with Mr. M. Curiossonne (…or us). He will keep anything you wish anonymous, of course.
Thank you for reading, sharing & caring,
szigfrid, manarori, JinaJina & Mingo 😘