Carcassonne (The Game, not the city)
About half a year ago a friend introduced me to the German board game Carcassonne, a tile-and-point world builder wherein you construct the ancient walled city in southern France by placing squares of city and landscape. You earn points by having one of your followers on a feature when it is completed. The followers are little wooden figurines and are general purpose. For instance, if you place the figure on a road then the follower is treated as a 'thief', but if you place the follower within a city then it is a 'knight'.
The game itself is quite genius in its simplicity, but the expansions are just awful! Seriously, they take a simple concept and bog it down with needless book-keeping. When I took an interest in the game I purchased the 'big box' hoping the expansions would add something to it, but no such luck. The extra tiles are nice, though. We tend to fill up the table whenever we play.
Anyways, I thought I'd share some of my house rules for the game, in case anybody else has played it.
1.) The Big Follower:
Gee, you've got a giant guy and he's worth double points. NO! I use the big follower as the point tracker for each player, allowing eight normal followers instead of the weird bonus point one.
2.) Burglar, Messenger, Builder, Pig
There were various rules attached to the special pieces that came with these associated expansions. I pitched them. Instead, I use these figures as specialized followers: followers that can only be played in a particular manner.
Burglar-> Cardinal (Can only be played as a monk)
Messenger-> Scout (Can only be played as a thief)
Builder-> Templar (Can only be played as a knight)
Pig-> Livestock (Can only be played as a farmer)
3.) Contested Features
In the core game, the player with the most followers in a feature is the one who gets to score it (how they get into the same feature is a component of the rules that I won't get into here, you'd have to play the game to understand). Instead, I let each player score EVERY follower in the feature when it is completed. For example, a city worth 12 points has one knight from player green and two knights from player blue. Green scores 12 points and blue scores 24 points. This makes the game very cutthroat, especially with cities which are the most popular to over-populate. Once we had a city score for over 300 points!
TL, DR: Carcassonne is a cool board game. Have you played it?
