Must or may - The Princess (The Princess and The Dragon)

[Windekind]

I want to post a topic about the feature the princess of the 3rd expansion of Carcassonne The Princess and The Dragon.
In the original version, which was released in 2005, says: If a tile fits a city in which one or more knights are located, one knight of his choice from this city MUST be returned to his owner.
Somtime later in the release of Big Box 2, Hans im Glück changes the rules from MUST to MAY. It brings the procedure in line with that of the tower, that may remove a follower if the player wishes. The RGG and ZMG editions of the rules maintain the rule that princesses must remove a follower.

Why should it be in the same line of the Tower? It has nothing to do with it?

Personally, I find the rule where you have to remove the knight more interesting. It makes the game more exciting because you know that there are 6 tiles in the game that ensure that a meeple of your opponent will be removed. You can remove your own meeple, but this may not happen very often, except if you can lock your opponent's meeple until the end of the game.
But if you have the option of choosing or that you can remove a 'meeple' or not, then I find this tile a lost tile if you do nothing.

Which rule do you find interesting?



Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=4227.0

[Halfling]

Why would you leave an opposing meeple when you can remove it?

[Decar]

might be worth more trapped than back in the player's hand

[Skull One]

Back when I was working on the unified Turn Order Summary for the CAR (now called Order of Play), must and may was always a little tricky to deal with due to making sure when the exact moment something had to happen.  Especially when there were several must/mays that might be triggered at once.  Personally, I have always preferred may over must.  There are several tactical reasons for this in my opinion.  The first being a very early draw of a princess tile where you are forced to play that tile on your own castle and inadvertently remove your own knight.  In fact it happened enough times we had a house rule that in the event that did happen, you were not forced to remove the knight. 

Quick side note. My lovely wife bought me an entire new set of the current Z-Man Game's print run of Carcassonne, because I like the new art work, for Valentines Day.  The printed rules for Princess and the Dragon has the rule listed a may not must for removal of the knight.  With that in mind...

When I was doing a once over of the new printed rules, I noticed Z-Man Game now uses the term meeple and figures interchangeably.  They had a chance to really clean up the nomenclature and sadly didn't.  Fortunately they did a fairly good job at the end of each rule set to list how the expansion rules effect the base game, all mini expansions and the 8 major expansions (save for Catapult which I am grateful they didn't reprint and the Under the Big Top, which hadn't been released at the time these rules were rewritten). 

[Meepledrone]

Hi Skull One!

It is great to see you around!

You don't know me but I know you from the world-renowned Order of Play... Let me explain.

I'm one of the members of the WICA team. Just in case you don't know it you can find the Wikicarpedia here:

http://wikicarpedia.com/

I dedicated many sleepless nights to translate some of the Reference sections of the CAR to WICA, one of them being of course the Order of Play. I started out from the version on the CAR and updated it to cover all the official and semi-official expansions available up-to-date covering Carcassonne I (C1), Carcassonne New Edition (C2) and the Winter Edition (WE).

I added a twist to it and some other Reference pages available to date (Game Reference, Figure Reference, Scoring During the Game, Scoring After the Game): the information shown on them it is dynamic, that is, at the top of each page you will find an Expansion Selector that will allow you what expansions (or parts of them) to consider to conform those pages.

There is one single core but, depending on the entry point, you can get three predefined flavors: C1, C2, and WE. By default you get the basic rules, but you can add expansions from any edition one by one, by Big Boxes or everything at a time. When combining expansions you can even highlight what parts come from other editions different to the preferred (default) one. I use session cookies to allow you to go from one page to the other maintaining state... Oops I'm getting technical. Forgive me 

The entry points to each edition are next:

* First edition (C1) - available from Main Page:

http://wikicarpedia.com/index.php/Order_of_Play_(1st_edition)

* New edition (C2) - available from Main Page:

http://wikicarpedia.com/index.php/Order_of_Play

* Winter Edition (WE) - available from Winter Edition hub:

http://wikicarpedia.com/index.php/Winter_Order_of_Play

I would be honored if you had a look of course. If so, you'll see I renumbered the phases and the steps to align them with the steps normally found in C2 rules and used the same color code. Additionally, Steps 4X group all the additional actions included in some expansions such as: Catapult actions, Bazaar auctions, Crop Circles actions, Escaping from besieged cities, and the double turn resolution. The dragon movement is scattered all around as it changes from edition to edition.

Steps 4x section changes somewhat from the CAR after reviewing the latest rules and clarifications form CarcC and CarcF: actions that happen once or twice during a double turn in a couple of cases. The big change is how bazaar auctions interact with the builder double turn. I followed the original HiG ruling as the one on the CAR was due to a mistranslation of the rules.

So feel free to stop by and let me know your thoughts. Your work was awesome to say the least, BTW.

Thank you in advance!

Cheers!!!

PS: Don't miss the following sections too:
* Game Reference: a page that serves as a master Order of Play for the whole game covering the preparation, the main game loop (order of play + scoring) and the final scoring. It includes additional phases to cover the placement of the River and the remaining abbeys, for example.
* Scoring During the Game: a fully revamped and updated version of the one on the CAR.
* Scoring After the Game: a fully revamped and updated version of the one on the CAR.
* Game Figures: a fully revamped and updated version of the figure tables on the CAR.

Cheers again!

[Skull One]

You didn't get to technical for me, lol.  Have been a software developer for the past 33 years, so I understood everything you were saying. 

Your approach to this has me quite intrigued and incredibly impressed.  So it would be my honor to review your hard work.  Because one thing we both share is the true headache of trying to make sure every base is covered under every condition.  You might have noticed my original approach was actually based on what it would take to actually program the game.  In fact some of the testing I did was actually written as code just to see where the flaws were. 

I'm just coming up to speed with the C2 rule set.  When I first started reading them, they actually felt familiar which I found odd. And then it occurred to me. They had probably read the CAR at some point because their clarification of interactions between expansions, at the end of each rule booklet, covered a lot of the points that CAR covered.

Is there a particular thread you would like me to add any comments or questions that might arise?  I don't wish to pollute this thread with technical talk about rule's timing, lol.

[Meepledrone]

Hi Skull One!

Regarding the clarification in the rules, I read Kettlefish was involved in proofreading the HiG German rules and I assume she gave her touch. It's a pity that HiG does not address minor expansions in those rules. HiG will not provide any clarifications for minor expansions either, as stated with a disclaimer in the recent minor expansion rules.

BTW, I created a thread for the discussion of the Order of Play:

http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=4233.msg62289#msg62289

Feel free to share your thoughts. 

Thank you so much in advance!!!