Curiosities week 1 - 2026

World Team Carcassonne Online Championship
2026
Week 1

Greetings fellow Carcassonnians,

The first round of the 2026 WTCOC is again already behind us and it started with a blast!

• Organising the match was therefore a race against the clock, not really being helped by some technical issues and the “brilliant” idea of BGA obstructing last minute tournament action. A little timeline in UTC (Chile -4; Belgium +2):
  • Monday 14h45: Both captains start discussing possible time slots, with a small window on the day being at 19h00 (Chl 15h00; Bel 21h00).
  • 15h15: Belgium captain N2xU drops in their national WhatsApp group the question if anyone can play ‘tonight’ instead of on the weekend.
  • 16h00: The Belgian captain confirms to the Chilean captain Vainiria that they can play at 19h00.
  • At that point Vainiria was driving to his work, thinking the 19h00 option was not really going to happen. So at every red light he called or texted his players to check their availability, wherein he found some obstructions and had to count on the flexibility and motivation of his team. For Example:
    • King Mauri, being out of Chile, had to adjust his trip schedule.
    • CrisRamirez confirmed a business meeting just minutes before, so he contacted the customer to check how patriotic he was. The customer was happy to reschedule for the glory of Chile.
    • Claudio Jorquera didn’t have the option to get home in time, so he went to an internet café.
    • Carito36 was in fact free, but her computer just broke down. Borrowing the computer of her neighbour solved that issue.
    • In the meanwhile, Vainiria himself arrived at work, stayed for 15 minutes and drove back home to be able to start setting up the duels.
  • 17h40: The line ups are known by both teams.
  • 17h45: Both captains start working like crazy to create the tournaments.
    • In addition to that, you must realize that the new tournament creation center of BGA doesn’t allow you to create tournaments less than 1h before the start of it and autocancels any duel without enough participants also 1h before. Meaning, at 18h00, all efforts would’ve been for nothing.
    • Fortunately, Vainiria learned a trick for that last part during the Copa America. When you create a tournament with 4 players instead of 2 and fill them with 2 extra players immediately, then the tournament doesn’t autocancel and correct players have more time to join. Of course the 2 stand-in’s need to leave the table once they have joined.
  • 17h59: Tournaments all ready to go. Great job!
  • 20h19: Belgium claims a 3-2 victory over the reigning Vice World Champions.
  • Monday 14h45: Both captains start discussing possible time slots, with a small window on the day being at 19h00 (Chl 15h00; Bel 21h00).
  • 15h15: Belgium captain N2xU drops in their national WhatsApp group the question if anyone can play ‘tonight’ instead of on the weekend.
  • 16h00: The Belgian captain confirms to the Chilean captain Vainiria that they can play at 19h00.
  • At that point Vainiria was driving to his work, thinking the 19h00 option was not really going to happen. So at every red light he called or texted his players to check their availability, wherein he found some obstructions and had to count on the flexibility and motivation of his team. For Example:
    • King Mauri, being out of Chile, had to adjust his trip schedule.
    • CrisRamirez confirmed a business meeting just minutes before, so he contacted the customer to check how patriotic he was. The customer was happy to reschedule for the glory of Chile.
    • Claudio Jorquera didn’t have the option to get home in time, so he went to an internet café.
    • Carito36 was in fact free, but her computer just broke down. Borrowing the computer of her neighbour solved that issue.
    • In the meanwhile, Vainiria himself arrived at work, stayed for 15 minutes and drove back home to be able to start setting up the duels.
  • 17h40: The line ups are known by both teams.
  • 17h45: Both captains start working like crazy to create the tournaments.
  • • In addition to that, you must realize that the new tournament creation center of BGA doesn’t allow you to create tournaments less than 1h before the start of it and autocancels any duel without enough participants also 1h before. Meaning, at 18h00, all efforts would’ve been for nothing.
    • Fortunately, Vainiria learned a trick for that last part during the Copa America. When you create a tournament with 4 players instead of 2 and fill them with 2 extra players immediately, then the tournament doesn’t autocancel and correct players have more time to join. Of course the 2 stand-in’s need to leave the table once they have joined.
  • 7h59: Tournaments all ready to go. Great job!
  • 20h19: Belgium claims a 3-2 victory over the reigning Vice World Champions.

Weekly records

• Number of games played: 187
• Number of duels played: 79
  • 1 duel was not played
• The highest winning scores in a game:
  • 145 Dos_Diable_nero (Jap)
  • 138 Dirty old town (Lat)
  • 138 Random_23 (Ukr)
• The game with the highest combined score in Round 1:
  • 265 Dos_Diable_nero (Jap) vs Germancito (Uru)
• The lowest winning score in Round 1:
  • 67 James Boon (Mal)
• The game with the lowest combined score in Round 1:
  • 131 (71/60) Berna1871 (Bra) vs Wolf Ren (Vnm)
  • 131 (67/64) James Boon (Mal) vs poopzone (Pol)
• The highest losing score in Round 1:
  • 124 tabbybrown (HK)
• The lowest losing score in Round 1 has been 35 points.
• The biggest “underdog” who won a game was Quabatrarz from Sweden. At the point he won his game there was a 318 ELO difference between both players. It wasn’t enough to win the duel but still …well done 👏. Rome wasn’t built in a day either.
• The longest road in Round 1:
  • 16 Aki_Stack (Chn), but sadly for them it didn’t lead to a victory (table #838498182).
• The largest completed city in Round 1:
  • 44 HotlyHotly (Twn) was the architect on duty (table #838258559).
• The largest field in Round 1:
  • 33 Larpaattori (Fin) and isloun (RCP) each had a 33 point field to farm on in their respective games (tables #838943721 & #837106765). The field didn't give the Finnish player the win, but it did the trick for isloun.
• The monastery points:
  • 36 Someone_you_know (RCP) took the most monastery points (4 completed and 0 incomplete) to his credit this round (table #837091063).
• The longest game this week was the deciding duel for the match point between Learn to fly (Bel) and CrisRamirez (Chl). They tortured their teammates with suspense for 29 minutes and 41 seconds. It was the Belgians who breathed a massive sigh of relief at the end.
• In that duel, Learn to fly (Bel) must have learned something else entirely when, despite losing game 1, came back to win game 2 and 3 by a 1p margin in both games.
• There were 5 instances of players running out of time during their games… Four of these losses were by two Ecuadorian players absolutely determined to give it their very best against their challenging Ukranian opponents.
• Only 1 game ended in a draw. In that game CTCTCTCTCT (HK) was ‘Raffed’ by Nethshrac (Fin).
• Thailand had a starting player in 9 of the 12 games (75%). Although potentially a statistical advantage, the Australian team decided to go against the odds and demonstrate that stats are only numbers. Even more… 4 out of the 5 teams with the lowest starting player percentages won their match.
• However, the starting player advantage was evident as 52.41% of the games were won by the starting player.
• At table #838426307, Australian player Megot Noskill pulled all 9 curves (RRFF).
• During all the games, 4 tiles were discarded: 3x the quadruple city tile (CCCC) and 1 time the crossroad (RRRR)
• The average number of meeples placed was 16.82. The average of points scored by a meeple was 5.10.
• At table #838972046, Berna1871 (Bra) went without a meeple for the last 19 tiles of the game, and still managed to win.

Curious Moments of the week

Last year, the record for the entire tournament was 23 tiles without scoring any points

Streaming Curiosity

When Mr.Curiossonne was watching the live stream of Greece vs Hungary by Nallerheim, his watchful eye noticed something curious. In the line up from Greece appeared this seemingly new player called sympathy. sympathy? Who are they and why aren’t they on the teamlist? The mystery was quickly solved when Nallerheim discovered & explained that he was trying out this new ‘Live score board’ and had it auto-translated from Ukrainian to English. That’s why mpatis’ (Gre) name also got translated to ‘sympathy’. Now we are curious what names could also have an interesting auto-translation.

Rookies of the Week

Steam4206 (Cat)

Imagine yourself making your WTCOC debut and instantly getting paired with viv-, the highest ranked player on BGA at that moment. Steam4206 must have thought “Nothing to lose so no stress” Steam4206 as he brought on a 2-1 upset against the French master. That’s entering the scene through big front gates in style!

Federikus (Uru)

Another entry with grandeur into the WTCOC scene with a 2-0 win against the Japanese master should (four time WTCOC Champion with a 15 duel WTCOC winning streak…his last WTCOC duel defeat was on May 14th, 2023 by chonps, Cze). Consider yourself warned about ‘Streak-Breaker Federikus’.

t was great to see 36 players making their WTCOC debuts this week,15 of which won their duel. Congrats to them all!

And a big ‘hats off’ to Ukraine, who lined up 4 debutants, all winning their duels 2-0.

Predictions

Mr. Curiossonne has had a busy time speaking to the different team captains this past week to get their predictions for this year’s WTCOC. Here are his findings:

• The 5-time WTCOC Champion team Japan remains the strong favourite to take the crown again this year with 86% of the team captains choosing them as a top 3 contender for WTCOC 2026 Champions. Other top contenders are Ukraine (69%) (Rank 1 ELO Team) and RCP (50%) (3-times WTCOC Runner-up)
• Finland became the top selection when it comes to the “Surprise Team of the Tournament”. With two new masters in 2026 alone – Lapinkoski and Larpaattori – the Finnish team is poised to be the dark-horse of this tournament. Will we see Finnish Grandmaster Nallerheim leading his team to a podium finish this year? 
• The team captains weren’t able to come to a consensus on which group was the toughest, with most captains split between Group F (42%) and Group H (39%). While Group F and H are Rank 2 and 3 for average ELO by group, Group B (Rank 1) only received 1 vote. Could it be that certain teams’ dominance in the Carcassonne scene has left the team captains to overlook the potential blood-bath brewing in Group B? Fellow assistant posij118 did run some dummy group simulations which confirms that Group B is the toughest group (statistically) but personally, Mr. Curiossonne is just hoping for interesting games (and potential upsets), regardless of who makes it through. 
• The team captains greatly favored Belarus (11 votes) and Australia (10 votes) to be the teams most likely to cause upsets in this tournament. Australia’s victory over the higher ranked Thai team is telling. Although the Belarusians fell to RCP 0-5, they have 1 more chance to take down a higher ranked team (Hong Kong) during the group stage. Australia is the only team from Pot 5 (aside from Peru who received a bye) who won their Week 1 match. Can the Carcaroos keep their momentum going with another upset this coming week vs the Czech Republic?

Team Fun Struff

Did you know that...

• There are now two Game Designers in the Malaysian team. Logan Ghanesh is part of the Faculty of Fun, which has developed and published food themed local games such as Nasi Lemak, and Roti Canai. And kimrhyme who founded nPips and published Furmation of Rome, and King and Peasant.
• Belarus claims to be the only landlocked and mountainless team participating in the WTCOC. There are actually 3 landlocked countries among the participants: Belarus, Hungary and the Czech Republic with their highest points being: 345m, 1014m, 1693m, respectively. Mr Curiossonne looked into this and discovered that both Hungary and the Czech Republic officially contain mountain ranges… whereas Belarus has to content itself with a central ridge.
• Hong Kong team members, like Sunny369, Littlesmallsmall and CTCTCTCTCT, played a lot of games in the recent online version of the Mindsport Olympiad. They did so well that they are confident that ‘team Hong Kong’ won the most MSO medals this year, but unfortunately none for Carcassonne. 
• All 10 Ukrainian players have reached Master level on BGA and 5 players have even achieved 800 Elo.
• Colombian siblings TRojasHenao (808) & Ext4ur (735) are the only brothers who have both reached the Master Rank on BGA.
• 8 out of the 10 Hungarian players have an all-time positive record when playing for the National Team.
• Belgium is only slightly behind Hungary, with 6 out of 10 positive records.

If your team is also keeping track of all-time records, please let us know how your team balance is!

Mr. Curiossonne needs your help

Mr. Curiossonne is keen on knowing what’s going on in your team. Did you have a big online yell’out together with your teammates after that first victory, did you follow your team's performance during a wedding, like Mr.Curiossonne’s assistant kaika87did, or anything else notable about your team? Please let us know.

kaika87 following Malaysia's match during a wedding dinner 😀 (not his own wedding, fortunately!)

Thank you for reading, sharing & caring,
szigfrid, JinaJina, Mingo, kaika87, posij118  😘

v

P.S. (A little extra...)

“Highest Points”

One of Mr. Curiossonne’s assistants enthusiastically investigated Belarus’s claim that it was the only team from a landlocked and mountainless country... and then wondered what players from other teams might define as a mountain. This led to looking up the highest point in each region with a WTCOC team. Have you visited the highest point closest to you, or any others? (Mobile users: See the image below the table for better viewing experience)