Carcassonne Central
Carc Central Community => Official Rules => Topic started by: Just a Bill on November 06, 2017, 09:06:30 AM
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I've been thinking about the rules for this promo expansion, and if we take them at face value there are a few odd consequences that I'd like to point out. For context, I will quote my own English translation (http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=3412.msg53037#msg53037) from the News thread — and I absolutely welcome any corrections where my translation may be faulty.
Gerber-Viertel: Bei jeder Wiesenwertung am Spielende, in der du die Bauernmehrheit besitzt, erhältst du zusätzlich zu den normalen Punkten für Städte 2 Punkte für jeden Stall (Kuh, Esel und Schwein) und jeden Bauernhof, der in der Wiese liegt.
Tanner District: During each farm scoring at the end of the game in which you have the majority of farmers, in addition to the normal points for cities, you get 2 points for each stable (cow, donkey, and pig) and each farmhouse that lies in the farm.
When a barn forces farmers to score, there will be no Tanner District bonus points, since they are explicitly defined to apply only during end-of-game final scoring.
Personal commentary: Seems like an unnecessary and anti-thematic restriction.
Hast du mehrere Meeple auf einer Straße, darfst du nur einen davon nach Leipzig schicken. Für den anderen Meeple darfst du aber die Punkte für die Straße nehmen.
If you have several meeples on a road, you can only send one of them to Leipzig. For the other meeple(s), you may take the points for the road.
Since there is no rule to the contrary, I think we have to assume that the majority is not recalculated. That is, if you and I both have 2 thieves on the road and you send one to Leipzig but I do not, we both still get to score for the road. Nothing in the rules says that you have to recalculate your majority, and it does not say your remaining thief scores only if you still have the majority; it simply says your remaining thief "takes the points for the road." This all seems to suggest that the timing goes as follows:
- determine majority
- each player in majority chooses whether or not to send 1 thief to Leipzig
- each player who was in the original majority and still has at least 1 thief left on the road scores the road
What all this means is that the majority is not recalculated except that if you only had 1 thief, sending him to Leipzig effectively removes you from the majority.
Personal commentary: Seems like it would have been more logically consistent to recalculate the majority after the thieves leave, but apparently that's not what the design intent was. So we just have to live with the inconsistency that if you send your only thief you lose your majority, but if you send one of multiple thieves you do not lose your majority even if you now have fewer thieves than somebody else.
Schickst du dabei den Meeple ins Wagner-Viertel bekommst du gleich die Extra-Punkte (siehe unten).
If you send the meeple to the Wagonmaker district you get the bonus points (see below).
This does not say "you get the bonus points if you still have a thief on the road," just that you simply get the bonus points. So it would seem that when you have only one thief on a completed road, and that thief is in the majority, and you send him to the Wagonmaker district, you score zero baseline points for the road (per one rule) but you still get 1 bonus point for each segment since you went to Wagonmaker (per this other rule).
Personal commentary: This inconsistency is more jarring to me than the other ones, probably because it is so subtle and easy to miss. And it leads to another question...
Note that this rule seems to apply only on the turn in which you send a follower to Wagonmaker. If you already had a follower in Wagonmaker and send your only thief from a road to some other Leipzig district ... I guess you don't get the Wagonmaker bonus points in that case because there's no special rule for it?
It's really unclear to me which exceptions they did and did not mean to communicate here. Which exception was it supposed to be?
- In spite of sending your only thief away from the road and getting no baseline points, you still get the bonus points but only if you are sending him to Wagonmaker right now.
- In spite of sending your only thief away from the road and getting no baseline points, you still get the bonus points if you have a follower in Wagonmaker (previously or just now arriving).
- Oops, we didn't mean to give you bonus points when you aren't receiving baseline points. This Wagonmaker thing only applies when you have other thieve(s) that are remaining on the road and you are sending a follower to Wagonmaker right now.
- Oops, we didn't mean to give you bonus points when you aren't receiving baseline points. This Wagonmaker thing only applies when you have other thieve(s) that are remaining on the road and you have a follower in Wagonmaker (previously or just now arriving).
- We didn't realize how inconsistent these things are. Perhaps we should discuss and get back to you.
I guess you can probably tell that confusing rules really frustrate me. Now, it's possible that there could be problems with my translation, or that some cultural conventions might make this more clear to a German reader. But if the translation is accurate and there are no "German unwritten rules" to guide us, then it seems to me that either this design was not sufficiently analyzed/playtested, or the rules as written were not intended to mean what they are saying.
Happy to be corrected if I've missed something, and happy to hear other opinions on (a) what you think they really meant and/or (b) what would have worked best.
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About farms: I don't see a problem here.
First of all, standard phrase - this expansion bla-bla-bla for basegame only bla-bla-bla. But even without that: basegame also taught us that farms are scored only at the end of the game, but then barns (and not only they) changed it. So, my opinion is, if we take into account expansions, there we should read "whenever farm is scored", in other words, just omit "at the end of the game" part.
Other questions seems reasonable, maybe we need an official clarification there.
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Barn is already overpowered so at least it would be a good idea not to score a barn farm for Leipzig extra points.
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Here's another one I'd like to seek opinions on.
Buchbinder-Viertel: Bei jeder Wertung eines abgeschlossenen Klosters (auch das eines Mitspielers) bekommst du 4 Punkte zusätzlich.
Bookbinder Quarter: During every scoring of any completed cloister (even one of an opponent) you get 4 bonus points.
It makes sense to me that when an empty cloister is completed, no bonus points are given because the cloister would not actually be scored. Agree or disagree?
I will also say that I think it's pretty clear that when an incomplete cloister is scored by an abbot, no bonus points are given.
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i would say that if an empty cloister is completed, this does not count for the Bookbinder Quarter. The rules state that this only counts for if one is scored
Completing an empty cloister does not score them.
And i agree with you regarding the scoring by an abbot, as it is no scoring for a completed cloister :)
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After playing with this expansion, I would say that it is very unbalanced and potentially broken. First off the wagon maker is the best of the bunch. I would think that the tanner is a distant second. The minter may be ok if you play with certain shield heavy expansions. We played with German Monasteries hoping to make the bookbinder worthwhile, but it still wasn't (possibly because the abbots were a better deal). So basically you want to go to the wagon maker and the tanner.
Now my wife went first and drew a CFRF tile. She played it on the tanner and blocked me off from that feature for the rest of the game. Had she played it on the wagon maker, game over. It is completely not fair that one player can get 2 points per road for the entire game and the other cannot by a lucky tile draw. I suggest adding a RRRF tile to the end of the tanner and wagon maker district before starting.
Has anyone else tried this expansion?
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Now my wife went first and drew a CFRF tile. She played it on the tanner and blocked me off from that feature for the rest of the game.
It sounds like you may have overlooked one of the rules. Assuming my translation is accurate, the rules say "You place your meeple on a district of Leipzig of your choice (it does not necessarily have to be the district to which the road leads)." So the only way your wife could block you off from a feature would be to finish all the roads that lead to Leipzig.
Now having said that, I do think your interpretation is a natural one based on the tile layouts. To be frank, it was not a good design choice to have four individual roads leading to four specific quarters, because this visually implies the opposite of what was intended.
If this had been a "real" expansion then perhaps a more thorough design analysis would have been done, but I suspect the promotional toss-off products don't get as much scrutiny. They aren't really intended to build the gameplay universe so much as to just have something to sell in limited quantities at a particular event, and the small scale probably necessitates some short-cuts during game development.
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In the version I got from Cundco the rules come in English. If the is demand for a scan and/or type up I will try to find the time to make one.
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It sounds like you may have overlooked one of the rules. Assuming my translation is accurate, the rules say "You place your meeple on a district of Leipzig of your choice (it does not necessarily have to be the district to which the road leads)." So the only way your wife could block you off from a feature would be to finish all the roads that lead to Leipzig.
Yep, I missed that rule. :-[ Thanks!
I guess the only way to be completely blocked out is to be playing a 5 player game where the first 4 players all get tiles with roads that end in cities or fields. Unlikely, but theoretically possible.
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It was only one game we played with that promo-expansion till now and to be honest we quickly locked all roads (it just happened that first 3 picks were roads that end in cities). We had 3 meeples (combined) in Leipzig.. I was in Wagon maker district and my girlfriend was in Minter and Bookbinder district.
After only one game I can't say much. I guess, in smaller games it has some meaning but when you play all expansions, Markets are less interesting, especially when you want to save your "guys" for a long long game and after that there are a lot of other possibilities to score. After "big" game is hard to say what % of points came from Leipzig but for sure you can see that you can level them (districts) based on luck factor.
* I agree that Wagonmaker is the most profitable because you can get road all the time, and with this advantage you don't need to wait for inn to get double points. From that point, only road tiles are more meaningful that only to still a farm :)
* Second for me is Minter district. Shields are just parts of your cities (or those that you're trying to still from someone). You don't need to think about theme. They are just there. You need to have luck to have them more than your opponent but they will probably come to you anyway so thats your profit for nothing.
* You need more luck to get profits from Bookbinder because its not only that you have to round your cloister but you have to pick it up at the first place. I can't say, because my girlfriend had a lot of them but how many games like this you'll have?
* We didn't score for Tanner district but for me it has something from both: Wagon maker - because its a lot of points that one/both of the farmers will get eventually and Minter - because (I guess) most of the time you don't build them in purpose. It's just a bonus when your trying to build another feature like road or city.
Time will show. We need more games with it.