Fan made expansions - I would like to hear more about them

[TheSteveAllen]

I am currently putting together a collection of Fan-made expansions, and I am finding it difficult to find much on this forum that tells me how good they are, what other expansions they work well with and any tactics for their use (and any clever tricks that they bring with them).

Over the last couple of weeks I have play-tested a few and, to be honest, they are very impressive when used with other expansions.

The main one that I considered was the enormous Forest expansion, which I put together over a few nights. I must admit that I was a bit disappointed with it at first, as all I kept getting was a map full of 4 point cities and not much else. I then added The Green Dragon expansion (to cure the problem of the lack of CCXX tiles) and this improved things greatly, but the board was still 'forest heavy' and finding places to put the 'regular' tiles was always difficult.

The problem was solved as soon as I added in The Princess & Dragon and Inns & Cathedrals, where the balance of the tiles righted itself. I then tried Bridges, Castles and Bazaars and Traders & Builders with the 2 forest expansions and this proved an even bigger success.

I would be very pleased to hear from anyone that has played these fan expansions who has useful advice, even if it is "don't bother, it is boring". At least this would make me think twice before spending many hours making up tiles and playing, only to come to the same conclusion.

It would also be interesting to see photos of the tiles 'in action' as, once again, they do not appear on this forum very often. There are plenty of pdf files of tiles to print, but I have not seen many actually printed and in use.

I have added one of my photos of my last game to get the ball rolling, and another photo of my newest addition to the fan made collection that I finished about an hour ago.



Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=3587.0

[CKorfmann]

I haven't been able to play with very many fan expansions yet as I've not had a good method to make them. 

I have tried Families/Family Feud.  It's a pretty old one, so you might have to dig for it a bit.  In short, it contains tiles with yellow and red pennants that can't occupy the same city as any with blue and white pennants.  That's the only difference and they score the same. 

You might find it easy to try out my own expansion, The Missionary.  It involves a new neutral figure and a disk in each player's color.  The main idea is to use it to convert opponents followers to your own.  It is easy to incorporate and you could use just about any game piece to give it a test run.  I might be biased, but I really enjoy this one.

You might also try the King's Gate that I made with Jeffrey Putnam.  It's just a two-tile expansion that has the ability to join any two cities on the board. 

I also updated an old expansion by Kevin Graham called Shepherds which predates the official Shepherd expansion.  It uses a special shepherd meeple and 5 sheep meeples in each color.  The object is to connect your shepherd to your sheep. 

There are plenty of other expansions that I think would be good, but I haven't played with them, so I couldn't offer you and objective opinion. 

However, while I can't specifically recommend them, there are a few that are simple enough to understand that you might be able to judge for yourself.  I'd say those are:
Wheel of Fortune extra tiles
Vanilla Tiles
Wells
Some of the Solazy expansions
Seasons
Cleric and Serf / Friar and Farmhand
Fortune Teller (available for download from HiG)
By Order of the King
Whaley's Grand Campaign

[wolnic]

There are a couple of expansions using Wells that add points to roads. I will randomly pick 8 or so for all our games. Can be beneficial if you can put them on roads with Inns. I've also printed off the Fishermen expansion, but just to give me different river tile layouts, and to allow us to have more realistic rivers, rather than using the fishermen scoring..

We regularly use a few of my own expansions (of course!), which mostly add alternative landscape elements to make a more interesting tilescape (aka break up fields) as opposed to adding loads of new rules. But I do include Decar's Astronomers (in one of its formats), and my own Stone Circles and Bountiful Harvest (around this time of year) as the mood takes me. I will occasionally throw in a few tiles from some random expansion, or a new configuration just to provide a new challenge in tactics and layout options - for example we've tried Basilica, Capitals, and some one-tile cities. I have downloaded many of the expansions, but haven't necessarily printed them off, although its interesting to see the different ideas, designs and rules that folks have come up with over the years - it's quite varied! And so as not to repeat something that's already been done.

[Dragonlord]

I've over 150 expansions in my games, on simulated game in my lost time during a month, I've probably applied the rules on 100 only (3500 tiles used). The complexity of some expansions need more time to play, a more complex game with all these elements.

[danisthirty]

Good work dragonlord - that's quite a landscape!

Was this the result of an actual game that was played, or did you just lay out all the tiles to look cool? They fit into the room very nicely in any case...

[TheSteveAllen]

Thanks to everyone who has so far responded to my post. It looks like I have a lot of testing still to do!

Last night I tried out my newly made Timber! expansion and, once again, I used official expansions with it that I thought would complement The Forest and Timber! itself. It seems quite important that, when playing with any of the Forest expansions, it is imperative to use an expansion that will allow you to remove trapped meeple, especially as each side of the tile has 4 options (CFRB) instead of only the usual 3 (CFR) - I have started to use the 'B' for the forest (bosque in Spanish, bois in French) as, otherwise, getting all meeple trapped before the end of the game is almost a certainty.

The obvious companion in the 'official world' to Timber! was Builders and Traders, as it relies on collecting tokens in exactly the same way as the official expansion does. In order to be able to 'rescue' meeple, I went for The Catapult for a change. This was a good decision but, unfortunately, an even bigger table is needed to be able to play the game, as you also need room at the sides to launch the catapult, as well as add all the new tiles.

I did not manage to finish the game, but I played (slowly) for about 3 hours, and found that I was still going with very few trapped meeple for any of my 'players'. This is very important for keeping such a long game interesting for all players.

Tonight I have made 'An Apple a Day' and I am looking forward to seeing how that turns out.

I have attached my final photo of last night's trial run so that you can see that most of the board is (eventually) getting filled, despite my attempts to block as much as possible.

[Dragonlord]

Good work dragonlord - that's quite a landscape!

Was this the result of an actual game that was played, or did you just lay out all the tiles to look cool? They fit into the room very nicely in any case...

It was the result of my simulated game for 6 players, played during a month. 

[TheSteveAllen]

Here is what I love about Carcassonne.

Fan made expansions - Chapter 1

Mr Vert was lagging behind in the scoring and had a meeple trapped in the middle of the board with no means of rescue thanks to no expansions being in use that eat, capture or otherwise remove meeple. In addition, he had spent a lot of time and turns developing a big city using his builder, only to see his beautiful city trying to be robbed from him by Mr Azure. On his turn, Mr Vert picked out a seemingly useless forest tile with an apple icon on it. He played the tile and picked an apple token. It was yellow. The ‘forbidden fruit’ one. You can put this under a meeple, and on the player’s next turn, he picks two tiles, plays one, puts one back, and has to remove the affected meeple back into stock.

"Hmmmm!" thought Mr Vert, "I can use this to rescue my trapped meeple", so he put the yellow apple token under his trapped follower.

Next turn Mr Vert picked out 2 tiles and duly returned the trapped meeple into his stock. “Phew! I thought that he would be stuck there for the whole game” he whispered to himself. He then looked at the two tiles from which he had to choose. One was a FFFF cloister. “Can’t do much with that” he thought, “there is forest everywhere”! He turned over the other tile. A CCBF splitter! “This closes the city, keeps out Mr Azure and, as my builder is still there, I get another turn”!

The only fly in the ointment was that, as the Seasons board was showing Summer, even though all roads were +2 points at that time of year, cities were -2. “Never mind, my 24 point city still gets me 22 points despite the balmy Summer air”!

After scoring the points, Mr Vert took another tile, as a consequence of having the builder in the now-closed city. This time it was a RRBF tile - not much use to anyone.
Mr Vert then saw that there was a hole in the board which his tile fitted exactly. This would give him a 3 tile road and, with the seasonal bonus, this would give him 5 points.
Mr Vert placed the tile, put his follower on the road, and watched as his little green counter moved, at last, into pole position on the scoreboard.
“I like Carcassonne” he thought to himself.

This is a true story, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

[TheSteveAllen]

The 'Merry Men' fan made expansion:-

Tried out the 'Merry Men' for the first time last night and found that this is a very interesting expansion which adds 10 'splitter tiles' to the forest which makes for a forest battle very similar to the normal 'farm battle' that most experience at the end of games. The Merry Men camp tile adds a bit of spice to the contest by giving double points to the battle over possession of the forest, but it also gives points to the player in second place - most unusual (and welcome) in Carcassonne games.

This is what comes in the expansion:-



The two photos below show how the battle over a forest develops and the use of the forest 'splitters' can clearly be seen:-



...and a bit later ......



The outlaw tile works the same as the King and Robber tiles, and adds a bit extra to the battle to win the 'Brawling Championship' over the forest.

Another well thought out and interesting Forest expansion. I will be regularly using this one, especially in conjunction with 'An Apple a Day',

[Dragonlord]

My  personnal markers and scoreboard.

[TheSteveAllen]

I test drove the new 'Bastions' expansion last night with (more than) a little help from Leven and it turned out to be a very intense, interesting game, once the rules became clear and I worked out the scoring system.
This is what comes 'in the box':-



Along with the base game, I included 'The River', 'Inns & Cathedrals', 'The Seasons' and 'The Bards of Carcassonne'.

It was not far into the game that I made my first mistake by not reading the rules properly. I did not realise that you could only play a bastion tile by joining it to a city, and not in any other way. I played this:-



and was told by Leven that this was illegal, as the bastion did not touch a city. It turned out that there was no valid position for this tile, as it came out too early in the game, so I put it back and carried on.

Shortly afterwards, my Red  was presented with this tile and board:-



This gave me several options. Amongst them were these:-









I went for number 4.

As the game moved on, I learned to count the points from the bastions by imagining a frame around the surrounding tiles so that I could not see the rest of the board. I also counted roads first, then cities that were not attached to the bastion, then 'others'  including other bastions in the surrounding tiles., which I initially forgot to do.

I only managed to complete 2 bastions. One for 12 points, and another for 11.



for 12 points and



This gave the 'Royal Archer' tile to my  , which he kept for the entire game.

I ended up with a selection of 6 incomplete bastions, unfortunately, largely due to the fact that they came out towards the end.













I am going to use these photos to practice my bastion score counting before the next game!!

We finished the test run at about 1 o'clock in the morning after comparing notes and recounting many bastions. The final board looked like this:-



with yellow winning by the smallest of margins (3 points if I recall correctly).

I will now try the expansion again with The Forest, Merry Men, Shrines and whatever other Occupiable Features I can think of.

Thanks for this Leven. It was a really enjoyable game, which I would urge everyone to try.

Two words of warning:-

1)  Do not expect the scoring to be easy at first, it gets easier with practice.

2) The placement of bastion tiles also becomes easier as the game moves on, with more options becoming available.

[jungleboy]

I have started to use the 'B' for the forest (bosque in Spanish, bois in French) as, otherwise, getting all meeple trapped before the end of the game is almost a certainty.

This is not important but bois usually means wood (the material) in French, although it can also be used like wood(s) in English in a different sense to mean a little forest. The equivalent of forest is forêt.