Carcassonne All Expansions

[Octavis Uberstine]

Carcassonne is a tile-laying game where players collectively construct the area around the medieval French city of Carcassonne while competing to place followers on various features and score the most points. First published in 2000, the game's accesible yet deep design has attracted a wide fan base and led to the development of numerous expansions and standalone titles in the Carcassonne line.

The Carcassonne Big Box combines the 2001 Spiel des Jahres winner with eleven of its expansions, making it a great starter set for Carcassonne fans and beginners alike. With it, players can experience the game's earliest expansions alongside more recent favorites. All expansions can be played in any combination, ensuring a unique experience every time you sit down for a game. Step into the world of Carcassonne!

Carcassonne standalone games take you around the world in time and space. Each has a unique theme and scoring system while retaining the original game's tile-laying mechanic. Travel to the Old West, venture across the South Seas, race down the Amazon, or introduce your kids to the magic of Carcassonne. The games in the Carcassonne line put the world at your fingertips!

My wife and I were playing Carcassonne last night with several of the expansions and we found that the game was taking a ridiculously long time. We had the base game, the River, Inns & Cathedrals, and Traders & Builders all in play at once. I am hoping to find a way to minimize the tiles in play without sacrificing the variations created by the expansions. Any suggestions?

The simplest way is to simply shuffle up the tiles, then pull about 60-150 of them for use. This will typically mean a 1-3 hour game, depending upon player speed and exact number of tiles. It also limits the needed table space. It does, however, also mean it is possible to not have any tiles turn up from a given expansion.

Also, don't use the River nor River II, nor the Count. The River I & 2 simply lengthen setup and increase think-time needed at start.... in addition to taking time to start, and adding 10+ tiles each. The count, by allowing reinforcement as it does, really adds to tactical think-times.

If using princess and dragon, you may want to hold out one volcano, and shuffle it into the play stack after generating the ones you're going to play with. This way, you know the dragon WILL show up, but might not be showing up twice. Same for Tower tiles from The Tower.

I probably wouldn't use the River in a 2-player game: it acts to rapidly expand the available playing area and gives the players more "elbow room". This may not be really what you want with just players, as it just means you may end up doing your separate things at opposite ends of the table.

I'm a big advocate of Traders & Builders and Inns & Cathedrals as adding a lot of strategic depth of the game, and I definitely wouldn't recommend removing them from the mix. You could try trying to add a time limit to your play - obviously you're now playing with over 100 tiles total, so if you're regularly taking over a minute to choose your move then of course you'll be looking at a 2-hour game. Or else you could agree to stop after half an hour or an hour or whatever: as long as all players got an equal number of turns then there's no real harm in calling time, right?

If it is just two of you use a chess clock to force yourselves to play faster. Play with the rule that if anyone runs out of time then they cannot play any more tiles. We play with a multiplayer game timer that I wrote for my mobile phone, and we (3/4/5 of us) can get through 3 games with the basic set in an hour. Before we had the game timer, we could drag out a game to well over an hour, and to be honest it was pretty tedious.

You could just not use all of the expansions at once. Instead, pick one or two expansions, maybe at random, every game. Now there is variability, and each game will be different, but you don't have a ton of extra tiles and rules in play in any given game.

This is how collectible card games like Magic the Gathering, or deck building games like Dominion, manage to stay enjoyable, despite having tons of expansion and variability. You don't increase the size of the game, or use all expansions at once, but rather each game you play can be played with a different set of elements but still within approximately the same level of time and complexity.

The best way to increase variability without impacting game length is to focus on the aspects of the expansions that do not involve tile drawing. For example, you could use the base set (with or without the River), the large followers from I&C, and the builder and pig pieces from T&B, which would add most of the options without changing the length of the game.

Use a 30-minute timer that is out of view of both players. Use all expansions you own mixed together in a big bag (The Traders and Builders bag will work). When the timer goes off, no more tiles or meeples can be placed.

Recently we've been using Inns & Cathedrals with Cult, Siege and Creativity. It seems to have drastically changed the balance so that it's very dangerous to try and build a city of any size. Most cities end up being 2-3 tiles, putting a ton of them in the field. Sieged cities make being a farmer even more attractive. Last game, every big meeple was a farmer and three players had 5 meeples each in one large field.

In my opinion you can combine any of the expansions (except possible the Catapult) together to make a decent new game. In fact we often combine different parts of different expansions if we want to avoid having too many rules. We might play with the inns, pigs and mayors for instance.

Also we sometimes want a longer game but without too many extra rules. For example, by playing with Traders and Builders we get a lot of extra tile shapes, which can be very satisfying if you like to fill in holes, but we might agree before the game that we won't use the resources associated with those tiles.

One expansion which we never use alone is the Princess and Dragon. We like to play with the dragon on a large board, as this helps to encourage more long-term strategies. For example on a small board (with the dragon) you are unlikely to risk making a large city, or placing a farmer early. If the board is bigger then the dragon is less likely to come near your meeples, so there is a bit more margin for prospective play.

In your example it sounds like you are using a sensible number of rules. If you're not a fan of small cities then you could maybe try playing without the siege tiles? However at this stage it becomes a question of personal taste.

I have played with Inns & Cathedrals, Builders & Traders, Princess & Dragon, Tower, and River all in play simultaneously. It didn't break the game, but neither was it really more fun in any way - it got very bogged down in mechanics.

My only caution is that the additional expansions begin to greatly increase the amount of time the game takes to play. I always found part of the enjoyment of Carcassonne was that it was quick and satisfying. When you add on two or three expansions the game begins to get really long and the interest of the parties can start to fade.

I find that the additional mechanics of the expansions rarely combine constructively. I will play any of the expansions alone, and many of them in pairs, but usually decline a game that uses three or more because of the sort of undesirable consequences you describe.

The Big Box versions (there are five total) of Carcassonne come with extra rules just to explain the interactions between each expansion contained within. There's even a popular name for combining all expansions in one game: Mega-Carcassonne.

To accommodate for all these expansions in a single Mega-game, the player base from BoardGameGeek has assembled all BigBox rules, as well as any official publications by Hans im Glueck and Rio Grande games into a single rulebook, called the Carcassonne Standard Complete Annotated Rules. Be warned, it's currently at a staggering 339 pages.

Carcassonne has produced numerous large, small, and promotional expansions. All but the promotional should be available in local game stores with the rules in the local language. Most of the mini expansions have been compiled into box sets to provide a better method of purchase for the consumer.

My kids have been getting into Carcassonne in a big way and theynoticed my one and only expansion on the shelf. (I've played otherexpansions in the computer version, but Idon't think any expansion is necessary to the original game.)Since Carcassonne expansions can be added piecemeal, we've startedplaying with just one at a time to see how it works.

The eagle-eyed in the audience will notice a mistake with a road tilethat dead-ends on an open field. This was the last tile played and ithelped one of my children get a slightly better score without changingthe outcome so I let it slide. (We also ignore the restrictions on theriver tiles designed to avoid getting stuck. It's fun to build bigbends and we feel free to change the flow of the river later if itcauses problems.)

This mistake helps illustrate the value and limitations of bridges. Ifyou have a tile that you really want to place somewhere but a roadedge is blocking you, a bridge might solve your problem. They caneither be built on the tile just placed or on an adjacent tile. Thekey is that both ends of the bridge need a footing in a field edge. Inour case, the bridge would not help since the other end of the bridgewould have been on a city edge.

We didn't use many bridges because we didn't often feel the need toplace a tile where they would be needed. Intuitively bridges feel likean expansion to the road mechanics. It's true a bridge can let youclaim a share in someone else's road, but their real value comes withfarmers. Unlike roads, bridges don't divide fields. A core strategy ofCarcassonne is finding ways to claim other people's territory byadding just the right tile. Bridges allow that to happen in spotswhere it would be impossible in the base game.

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