Carcassonne Central
Carc Central Community => General => Topic started by: cicerunner on March 16, 2020, 03:47:30 AM
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What are the House Rules that you use that you'd recommend to others? I am particularly interested in those you use most often, because they improve or fix something compared with the written rules.
I'm still new to Carcassonne and so I'm still experimenting and things are changing often, but these are my current ideas.
• When using the Festival I prefer to use it just for tiles, but if I'm playing with children I often allow (only) them to exercise the retrieve meeple option.
• I don't have the expansion yet, but think I will use Abbeys in a similar way, not taking one myself, but distributing them to rebalance any difference in ability.
• I've yet to actually decide on or use this, but I'm thinking of addressing the overpowered scoring in the Circus by reducing Ringmaster points to 1 per adjacent feature and removing the flea and elephant to reduce luck. (For a strategic game. Probably leaving them in when playing with children again I guess.)
But enough of my ramblings, what do you use that's actually stood the test of time?
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Hi cicerunner,
Interesting topic ;)
• I've yet to actually decide on or use this, but I'm thinking of addressing the overpowered scoring in the Circus by reducing Ringmaster points to 1 per adjacent feature and removing the flea and elephant to reduce luck. (For a strategic game. Probably leaving them in when playing with children again I guess.)
Regarding your ramblings with the Big Top I just had an idea when reading your initial post:
* You use the big top to mark the current location of the circus as usual but no animal token is placed underneath.
* Instead of revealing an animal token with a number, when scoring the big top, you just roll the flier die and get a number from 1 to 3.
* Each meeple around the big top location will score as many points as indicated by the die.
If you consider 1 to 3 is a low score per meeple, you can score twice the number on the die (2, 4 or 6) instead.
I prefer the 1 to 3 version as you keep the scoring contained a bit. Exp. 10 tends to overscore in my opinion. In this line, I would keep ringmasters scoring with 2 points per circus/acrobat tile in the vicinity by maybe reduce acrobat scoring down to 3 points/acrobat.
What do you think?
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I like it! It's interesting to see what others might have in place to balance things out in a way!
I've got a house rule on Abbots. I usually use the C2 Abbot meeples for the Monestaries expansions. This way I limit these to 1 monestary per player. You can only use your abbot in a monestary once (unless it's removed by a different element in the game), and if you draw other monestaries later, you can only use them as cloisters.
In the beginning we've had 1 player get 4 monestaries in a game, making it feel unbalanced, so I put that in place (especially as I didn't have C2 Cor a while, but did have the abbot meeples)
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The most important house rule for me is with Towers. I hate the fact that when you place a tower beside a tile with a meeple on it that you can add a tower piece and immediately take the meeple. This leaves no opportunity to save the meeple by topping the tower or finishing the feature, or in fact placing a tower piece somewhere else on the board in a position to take a meeple on your next go (thereby giving the opposition a decision to either take mine or save his own). Therefore we play that the first tower is a base (I.e. can only remove a meeple from its own tile) then 2 tower pieces is the tile beside and so on.
Have I explained this ok?
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Keep score using excel or similar spreadsheet so that all 8 meeples are used on the tiles instead of 7.
In a 2 player game, even up the tile count by including the labyrinth tile or use the City of Carcassonne instead of the start tile, thus each player has 36 tile placements.
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I also have a set of coloured dice to match the meeples which I use for scoring. So each player places the coloured die on the score track with the single dot facing up. When they go round once, change it to 2 spots. This also gives each player an extra meeple on the board.
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1. When we use the Bazaars tiles, we play with the Fortune Teller fan expansion rules instead. Bazaars as stated in the rules are not enjoyable at all.
2. Every player can throw up to 5 random tiles from other expansions in the bag. (This is an attempt to reduce tile counting). Extra rules associated with those tiles don't count, so if I pulled a princess tile and we weren't playing with Princess and Dragon, she doesn't do anything special.
3. Sometimes we use the Count of Carcassonne or Wheel of Fortune start tiles, but never ever play with those rules.
4. We stole the "druid rules" from the Isle of Skye expansion. It works like this, you lay 5 tiles down in a row before the game begins. Before taking a tile from the bag, you can instead take the right most of the 5 tiles for free. The other 4 tiles cost points based on how far they are from the right most tile. So the leftmost tile costs 4 points! Whenever a tile is bought or taken from the 5 tile row, the tiles are moved to the right and a new leftmost tile is added from the bag.