My family and I are Carcassonne newbies (just purchased the new basic and several expansions) and ran into something while playing tonight that we cannot find explained anywhere in the rules or CAR, and could not reach an agreement on. For the others that popped up before finding the CAR, we were able to come to a general agreement, so this stalemate was frustrating!
We were playing with the new Carcassonne basic & the BCB expansion - our BCB was by ZMG.
I quickly photoshopped the pieces of the board in question to give you a visual. It came down to the last tile. Our son wanted to use it to close a small city to max out his possible points. Since the opposite end of the city was a road, he used a bridge on an adjacent piece (Tile 3) to allow the placement. My hubby agreed this was acceptable. His reasoning was the bridge can be used anywhere - as long as both ends of the tile where the bridge is used are on a farm - irregardless of any pieces that may already exist on the other side of the end of the bridge.
I argued that because the bridge acts as a road piece and because the road adjacent to where the bridge would end (Tile 4) was already in place, then in order to use the bridge "Tile 4" would either need to have a connecting road to continue on or the space would need to be empty. That because a bridge acts like a road, you cannot run it into a farm after the bridge - because doing so would negate the original reason to use the bridge. For example you could not connect Tile 2 directly to Tile 4, so you should likewise not be able to do so using a bridge in between. I further pointed out that the example of connecting multiple bridges was used when the 2nd bridge was added to a newly connected tile, thus continuing a bridge already in place.
I hope that makes sense and I hope you can provide some clarification. I apologize in advance if the answer to this is completely obvious and self-explanatory to seasoned players. I am choosing to shamelessly hide behind the old adage "there are no stupid questions except those not asked".
PS: The verification questions to register and to post are not instantly known to those that are brand new to Carcassonne! I bet you have lost a few members/followers who were seeking answers but didnt want to bother trying to find the answers to these first.
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