If you come from the classical edition (C1 for short), you may probably know that the new edition (C2 for short) modified the rules for the wagon.
The C1 rules indicated that the wagon could move from a completed feature to an adjacent one but didn't specify what "adjacent" meant for them.
The definition of "adjacent" was painstakingly clarified by Kettlefish through a number of conversations with Hig back in 2013, that can be found here:
http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=214.0Here you can find a summary of the clarified rules for C1 (link to
WICA):
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Adjacency: The wagon could only move to an unoccupied, incomplete feature connected by a road or sharing a surface/edge/wall:
o Cases allowed:
- Road to road through a crossing
- Road to any claimable feature and vice versa: city (through a gate), monastery (or equivalent feature such as an abbey), etc.
- A city to an adjacent abbey and vice versa
- A city to a monastery within and vice versa
o Cases not allowed:
- Two cities with touching walls or tips on the same or on different tiles.
- Two cities connected by "small roads" where meeples cannot be placed.
- Two cities crossing via bridges but no connected via roads.
- Two roads separated by a feature (any area on a tile that can be claimed by a meeple or that triggers a function)
- A road touching a city wall with no gate
- A road running through a city via a tunnel or passing over via a bridge
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Placement: the wagon could be placed on any tile of the chosen unoccupied, incomplete feature.
Because of these limitations HiG decided to change the definition of "adjacent" for the wagon in C2, so now the wagon can move to any unoccupied incomplete feature on the same tile or an adjacent one.
So the thematic coherence that wagons followed roads to move from feature to feature is gone in C2. It was cool in my opinion and the addition of those many limitations is disconnected packets of information made them difficult to trace.
This said, a few days ago, I was revisiting the archived HiG pages in web.archive.org and came across this Exp. 5 FAQ archived between 2014 and 2017...
http://web.archive.org/web/20170728123659/http://www.hans-im-glueck.de/carcassonne/erweiterungen/abtei-und-buergermeister/Wohin darf der Wagen?/ Was ist ein angrenzendes Gebiet?
Der Wagen darf in ein angrenzendes Gebiet.
Ein angrenzendes Gebiet ist ein Gebiet (Straße, Stadt, Kloster) welches visuell an ein anderes Gebiet angrenzt.
Dies beinhaltet unter anderem Straßen, die Stadtmauern berühren, Brücken, die andere Gebiete überlagern und Städte, deren Stadtmauern sich berühren.
...that means the following in English...
Where can the wagon go?/ What is an adjacent area?
The wagon is allowed to move to an adjacent feature.
An adjacent feature is a feature (road, city, cloister/monastery) which is visually adjacent to another feature.
This includes, but is not limited to, roads that touch city walls, bridges that span over other features areas and cities whose walls touch each other.
Look at the parts in red. What the heck...?!? What happened here? Are the automatic translators I'm using failing miserably?
This seems a tweaked version of the C1 clarifications in 2014. Some points get closer to C2: They allow you to jump between cities touching their walls or between features overlapping due to a bridge... Was this the original intent by HiG? Is this an afterthought?
After this finding, I happened to stumble upon a couple of posts in threads from 2017 mentioning this same FAQ but the discussion focused on other aspects of the rules changes, therefore omitting the red part and its implications for C1...
* CarcF (2/2017):
https://www.carcassonne-forum.de/viewtopic.php?f=292&t=3662#p46509* CarcC (5/2017):
http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=3321.msg49363#msg49363 Any thoughts?
Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=4725.0