Curiosities week 3 - 2026

World Team Carcassonne Online Championship
2026

Hello friends of the mighty meeple,

We’re halfway through the group stage! As usual, Week 3 was a highly impactful one for most teams. Some have already secured their place in the next stage, while others are keeping their hopes alive with increasingly sophisticated calculations about their remaining chances.

Japan, Brazil, France and Poland can heat up the popcorn and digitally high five each other since they are all certain of their ticket for the play offs. Will that lead to tactical decisions, like resting players or giving others a chance? Or will they stay focused on winning their group, advancing straight to the semifinals and avoiding the Round of 16 entirely?

Week in review

• Number of games played: 192
• Number of duels played: 79
• 45 duels had 2 games played (90 games total).
• 34 duels had 3 games played (102 games total).
• Only one match (out of 16) ended in a 5:0 sweep, while 9 finished with a tight 3:2 scoreline.
• 5 games ended in a draw.
• Alas, one duel was not played in round 3 due to a no-show
• only one player ran out of time.
• 9 tiles were discarded across 8 different games (CCCC × 5, FFFF x 3 and RRRR × 1), and this is the first week with a discarded monastary.

Weekly records

• The highest winning scores in a game:
  • 154 posij118 (Cze) (new season record)
  • 137 King_Deded4d5 (Aus) (2nd week in a row in the Top Three)
  • game_over (Rom)
• The game with the highest combined score:
  • 254 JuankyEND (Ecu) vs small_red_van (UK)
• The lowest winning score:
  • 69 BDDL1 (Uru)
• The game with the lowest combined score:
  • 125 BDDL1 (Uru) vs Priskus (Por)
• The longest road:
  • 14 kostra (Ger) at table #845836291..
• The longest incomplete road:
  • 13 Megot Noskill and this long and winding road (consisting of both curves and straights) led to him winning at table #845847251..
• The largest completed city:
  • 48 game_over (Rom), closes the biggest city yet (table #845894649). (new season record)
• The largest ruin:
  • 22 small_red_van (UK) if completed, the city would have won them the game (table #845956068) (new season record)
• The largest field:
  • 33 gdarruda (Bra) field led to him to win at table #846073126.
• Monastery points:
  • 43 Tompa99 (Cro) (4 completed and 1 incomplete) monasteries led to a win at table #845549063. (new season record)
• Latest first point scoring:
  • 30th tile Kithara (Jap) opened the scoring with the 30th tile at table #845878863, (another new WTCOC record, topping last week’s 29th tile). We should remind everyone that the latest first point scoring for WTCOC 2025 was 23 tiles.

Weekly facts & figures

20 Days — believed to be the longest gap between 2 WTCOC matches. It was a long wait for the Belgian team after their WTCOC 2026 opening match vs Chile on the first day of the tournament (13 April). With a bye and a week to rest during Week 2, the Belgian team faced Brazil for their 2nd match on the very last day of week 3 (3 May). That is 20 days (~480 hours) in between matches.

Week 3 saw multiple tiles getting discarded:

• CCCC was discarded 5 times

• FFFF (Field monastery) was discarded 3 times

• RRRR (Crossroad) was discarded once

This was the first week a field monastery tile was discarded, and KR_ Knight_ Realm (Bel) discarded three of them! (Two at table #846075152 and one at table #846079509)

Tile Carcanopoly achievements

Mr Curiossonne and his assistants found more examples of players monopolizing certain types of tiles in week 3:

• JuankyEND (Ecu) and should (Jap) both acquired the “Straight [road] to Hell” achievement by drawing all straight roads at tables #845956068 and #845914295 respectively.
• UY_Scuti (Pol) unlocked the “Megot Allcurves” achievement by drawing all curves at table #846021868
• Meami (Ger) drew all but one (12/13) of the road end tiles at table #845823408. That includes the crossroad, T-junctions, road monasteries, rose (CRRR) tiles and 2 of the 3 horse (CCCR) tiles.  only leaving one (!) road end-tile for his opponent Shayne (Aus). 
• All 6 monasteries - 9 players:  Defdamesdompi (Bel), James Boon (Mal), HotlyHotly (Twn), carky (US), Logan Ghanesh (Mal), YguruguruY (Jap), Sportr (Por), JohnMav (Gre) and Adanlasheras (Chi) Three of those games came from the Malaysia vs United States match. 
• Kithara (Jap) ended up with all 8 “big city” tiles at table #845878863
• Lazybore (UK) monopolized all 10 “doritos” at table #845951112; the most improbable monopoly of the week. 

Rookies of the Week

King_Deded4d5 (Aus)

Showing up at the WTCOC for the first time and playing AND winning your first 3 duels. It ain’t nothing, but Aussie King_Deded4d5 did it, and not against the easiest opponents either! kostra (Ger) and gorufu__ (Tha), two former National Champions, had to kneel to the King of the Kangaroos. Hats off!

Honorable mentions:

The pressure was on for marusingfire (Jap) to follow the footsteps of his fellow Japanese debutants. He didn’t fail! This means that after 3 rounds, all 5 Japanese deputants have played a total of 7 duels, winning all of them (giving away only 3 games total). Very, very impressive

Ecuadorians Jotanan & JuankyEND are getting into the flow of the tournament by winning their first WTCOC duels, only narrowly missing Ecuador’s first match win. Future opponents, be warned! 🐢

28 rookies played this week, 9 won their duels. Congrats to all!

Team Fun Stuff

Our Greek correspondence informed us that the Greece championship took place on 25-26 April with 23 participants, with 4 players from the national team taking part (dark_passenger84, Mpatis, JohnMav and Loukasnks). Against all odds, the two Greek WTCOC 2026 rookies outshined their experienced team members and faced off in the finals, with JohnMav winning over Loukasnks and securing the title of national champion.

HotlyHotly (Twn) vs g3rappa (Rom) duel this past week is a repeat of their faceoff from the 2022 Carcassonne World Championship Finals. While the Romanian managed to secure the world title back in 2022, the Taiwanese was victorious in the WTCOC match, winning 2-1.

Bluste’s (Cro) spree of facing world champions ended in Week 3, so we looked into which other players could take over his role. Taiwan players 0607 and HotlyHotly have both faced World Champions (Mars15 and g3rappa from Romania), and either of these Taiwanese teammates could face 2024 World Champion senglar in their week 4 match against Catalonia. In Group F, Littlesmallsmall (HK) could also face off against 2016 World Champion Someone_you_know (RCP) this week, having already faced 2026 CCL Champion Nallerheim (Fin) in Week 1.

Seeing Double—Curious Coincidences

Mr. Curiossonne loves coincidences, and Sunday’s Malaysia vs. USA match was bursting with them. At first glance, you might have thought you were seeing double thanks to the striking similarities between the Malaysian and American flags—but that was only the tip of the iceberg. It turns out there were also…

• 2 players named Alan

• 2 players named Justin

• 2 players named James (plus one Jacques, which is the French equivalent to James)

• 2 mirror-image duels (Alan vs James and James vs Alan)li>

These coincidences might have remained undiscovered, except that 2 (!) of Mr. Curiossonne’s assistants—kaika87 and Mingo—just so happen to hail from Malaysia and the United States and know the first names of their compatriots. Once it became clear that this match was a nexus of coincidences, it wasn’t hard to find more: it was one of 2 matches last week with 2 tied games—and every duel wrapped up in exactly 2 games!

Mr. Curiossonne presents...

Curiosity Copies, carcassonne.cat, & wtcoc.net

So what is up with the carcassonne.cat website? Mr. Curiossonne spoke with web manager danisvh (Cat) and learned that malware is generating infected code/files and blocks access to pages... and there seems to be no way to permanently fix it. They've reinstalled WordPress, plugins, and themes; they are monitoring the site and they’ve installed security plugins—but nothing works for long. It’s still giving them trouble.

The WTCOC app therefore decided to "jump ship" and move to www.wtcoc.net, and the Weekly Curiosities followed close behind. This move will allow danisvh to implement his wish-list of features and fixes to make life easier for everyone in the coming years: allowing schedule changes and player substitutions, better deadline management, and live updates from BGA

Mr. Curiossonne needs your help

Some players are flooding Mr. Curiossonne’s mailbox, but he’s still keen on more juicy stories. So… Did your attention seeking kid push your laptop’s power button during those crucial dying seconds of your game? Or did you all meet up for a beer to celebrate your latest victory? Please let us know!

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