Anatomy of a Game: The Carcassonne Standalones, Part Two: Rules Changes

Welcome to what just might be my last game design article on Carcassonne. In case you've missed them I've written five previously. The first four extensively covered the main game and its expansions while the last article instead looked at the standalone variants, and examined how their tile selection and scoring differed.

• Carcassonne Part One: The Original Game
  
• Carcassonne Part Two: Balance and Tiles
  
• Carcassonne Part Three: Cooperation and Competition
  
• Carcassonne Part Four: Complexity & The Rivers
• Carcassonne Standalones Part One: Tiles and Scores
  

This week I'll be continuing my look at the six standalone Carcassonne games and taking a look at how each one offers different answers to some major game design questions. I've identified three major elements, each of which differs quite a bit from game to game. Examining them offers some interesting insights both into game design and how the Carcassonne series has changed and evolved.

	Orig.	H&G	Ark	Castle	City	Discovery
2-Tile Penalty	Scores as Unclosed	No Nugget	None	Minimal	Smaller Market Value	Scores as Unclosed
Edge Matching	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Stuck Meeple Balance	None	Minimal	Ark	Easier to Recover	Easier to Recover	Recover

We'll look at each of these elements in turn.

2-Tile Penalty

The original rules for Carcassonne (and the ones still used in the "official" Rio Grande edition) call for a 2-tile penalty: if you make a city out of just two tiles, you only get 2 points, not 4. The reason behind the 2-tile penalty has never been clear to me. I suppose Jurgen-Wrede thought it was too easy, and that it might encourage tactical in-and-out play where you never got to build larger cities. But, having always used the current German rules for play (which get rid of the 2-tile penalty), I just don't see that, and generally I don't see any reason that allowing two tile plays might be a bad thing.

Conversely it was pretty clear that the rule to disallow them was a bad thing. It added unnecessary complexity to the game by introducing a seemingly arbitrary special case. The SdJ committee was probably correct in demanding that it be removed, and I expect the game is better for it.

Only one standalone game has tried to match the original game's rule, and that's Discovery, and I think the results speak for themselves. Though Discovery is for the most part an elegant game, it introduces the 2-tile penalty to every type of terrain which adds an intimidating grid of possibilities to the game where each terrain can be scored in three different ways, which turns out to be the biggest barrier to getting people into the game.

However, if we assume there is some good game design reason for the 2-tile penalty, we might not want to see it utterly removed. Instead more elegant mechanisms should be constructed where players don't have to remember an arbitrary rule, but instead play as they are "supposed to" because of more organic gameplay mechanics. A few of the other Carcassonne standalones show how this can be accomplished.

Hunters & Gatherers introduces an organic 2-tile penalty in a very clever way. All of the forest tiles except "caps" have gold nuggets on them. The result is that if you make a 2-tile forest you don't get a nugget, while if you make a forest of 3 or more tiles, you do. (And you want the nugget, because it gives you an extra play.) This pretty much exemplifies how you can take a rule and turn into an integral part of the gameplay instead.

In City Jurgen-Wrede does something very similar. Markets score based on how many colors they include, and there's just one color per tile, so you're encouraged to build markets to include all three colors--which will be at least three tiles. Like H&G this is a great alternative to the original because it depends on the pieces not the rulebook.

(Conversely Ark just ignores the 2-tile issue, while Castle mostly does; in the latter you're encouraged to build big houses to score the "largest house" and you might work on a big house or tower if you have a doubler tower bonus tile, but you won't encounter either element in every game.)

Edge Matching

In most of the Carcassonne games you have to match every element on the edge of tile. However in Castle you only have to match the roads, not the other terrains. Jurgen-Wrede then mirrored this approach in City.

The difference has a few different results, but I think the largest has to do with 2-player game.

After numerous two-player games of Carcassonne I've come to the conclusion that it fails as a 2-player game, at least for casual and fun play with your family. The reason is that it's too easy to get into someone else's terrain. Particularly with the original set of Carcassonne it's often possible to play a single tile that will almost automatically grant access to your opponent's large city or field. Granted, there are ways to play the game better to try and avoid this, but sometimes you just have to take chances, and if you do the opportunity of getting screwed is really high in a 2-player game.

This is a result, I suspect, of Carcassonne being designed for multiplayer play rather than 2-player play. In a 3-player game it's fun to have two people in a terrain because it creates cooperative opportunities, and at the same time you have two people trying to keep that third person out of the terrain. Conversely in a 2-player game if someone shares your terrain with you it effectively takes all of your points away. You can spend a few turns building, and then your opponent takes it away with a single play.

The partial-edge-matching of Castle and City is exactly what's needed to fix that. A player can no longer play a single tile that can give him almost guaranteed access to your terrain. Because there are so many tiles that can be played in any location, you're much more likely to block him. On the other hand there's still some opportunity to get in, if you can match the roads before your opponent can. Thus it's a nice match of risk-tasking where the risk and reward are in much better tune for 2-player play than in the edge-matching Carcassonne games.

Stuck Meeple Balance

I've long thought that the expansions and variants of Carcassonne have largely served to resolve problems in the original game. One of those problems was definitely that your meeples could get stuck, slowly decreasing your options (and frustrating you!) as the game went on. Expansions to the original Carcassonne just tended to multiply this problem by extending the game length (and thus giving you more time to lose your meeples). Conversely some of the standalone games have tried to solve it.

Hunters & Gatherers, the first standalone didn't really do anything. You can sometimes play huts if your meeples are stuck, but those huts also resulted in you having a smaller number of meeples which can make the problem worse.

Castle and City didn't directly address the problem either. However the partial edge matching makes it harder to totally block a space, and thus it's more likely that your meeples will come back you. They also both introduced city walls which can speed up the process of getting your meeples back by blocking off one (or more) sides of a terrain. These all combined to offer a pretty decent solution to the issue.

Then, wwhen we get to Ark and Discovery, we find that each game much more explicitly offers an alternative to the stuck-meeple problem through an alternative action that you can take rather than picking a meeple up.

Ark is a bit more elegant. You can move the Ark of the Covenant around the board, and when it hits your meeples on the board, you get points. Thus not only do you have an alternative action when you can't place a meeple, but you actually can be rewarded for your meeples being stuck.

Discovery instead attacks the problem dead-on. Instead of placing a meeple you can remove a meeple, scoring it as you do. So that life isn't too easy you only get half the normal points if the terrain wasn't closed.

Both of the latter solutions work pretty well, while conversely the partial-edge-matching is a decent answer too, meaning that all four of the latter standalone games have pretty good solutions to this original problem.

Conclusion

When I first started playing Hunters & Gatherers , I thought, "This is Carcassonne done right. I can no longer say that, because I think every variant of Carcassonne has improved on the game in some way. Generally, I'd rather play the variants than the original as a result.

Overall, if I had to pick, I'd say that Castle and City and the two best. This is primarily thanks to Reiner Knizia's design. He's one of my favorite designers, and Jurgen-Wrede was very right to pick up many of his ideas for City.

However, as this and the last article shows, there have been improvements through all the Carcassonne variants, and they've pushed the original game's design in interesting new ways.

Anatomy of a Game: The Carcassonne Standalones, Part One: Tiles and Scores

Last year I wrote a series on game design articles on the original Carcassonne and the expansions for that game. If you haven't read them yet, those articles are:

• Part One: The Original Game
  
• Part Two: Balance and Tiles
  
• Part Three: Cooperation and Competition
  
• Part Four: Complexity & The Rivers
  

I've long intended to to follow those articles with another part or two talking about the game design of the Carcassonne stand-alone games, and now I've finally been encouraged to do so by the publication of my Carcassonne overview in Knucklebones Magazine.

So, what are the Carcassonne expansions, and what do they bring to the original game?

This week I'm going to start off by talking about the games, the tile distributions, and scoring, particularly focusing on how changes to the tiles and scoring change the feel of the later games. Then in two weeks I'm going to finish up the topic by talking about more far-reaching rules changes.

The Six Carcassonnes

There are, to date, six distinctive Carcassonnes available for play.

Carcassonne: The original game, as extensively discussed in my first anatomy article and my original review.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers: A complex variant intended for the more advanced player. Meeples are much more valuable because of their scarcity, and there's a whole new piece to score, the hut. However land terrains are largely the same, except for changes introduced by the hut, and the fact that fields are much more constrained. See my review.

The Ark of the Covenant: A close cognate to the original game created for the religious community. It also simplifies fields, adds an ark which you can move if your meeples are all committed, and exchanges monasteries with something just as hard to score. See my review.

Carcassonne: The Castle: A 2-player game by Reiner Knizia that shakes up the game with a sharply constrained playing space, non-edge-matching tiles, special powers if you hit certain scores exactly, and bonus points for "majority control" and overall tile layout. See my review.

Carcassonne: The City: A 4-player max game that was printed in an expensive limited edition. It builds on some of Knizia's ideas and also introduces a whole new bit of wood--wall pieces which are added as the game goes on. See my review.

Carcacssonne: The Discovery: The newest Carcassonne, and a Leo Colovini design. It's back to basics in many ways, without the bells and whistels of other recent productions. The only notable innovation is that meeples can be removed without closing areas down. It was distributed badly for a year thanks to an exclusive deal between Rio Grande and Funagain that kept it out of the mainstream. I've finally gotten a copy, but I've only played it twice and never reviewed it.

Generally my experience is that every single one of the Carcassonne standalones is a better game than the original Carcassonne without expansion. (As I wrote in previous articles in this series, it took two expansions before the original game really got its tile distribution down straight.)

Beyond that they have a lot of interesting elements that are worth discussing.

The Changing Carcassonne Tile Distribution

In my original articles I talked a bit about the tile distribution of the original Carcassonne game and the fact that it was somewhat flawed. There were a number of different problems, but two are notable here for how quickly the first new Carcassonne game, Hunters & Gatherers, fixed them: fields and cities could both get too big, way too big in the case of fields.

Fields: One way to measure average field size is by looking at the field-to-tile ratio, which is how many distinct fields that are on the average tile. For the original Carcassonne that ration was 1.75, and it was brought up to 1.96 through the first two supplements (an increase which slowly made fields smaller).

Hunters and Gatherers, the first standalone game, immediately went in the same direction, offering a field-to-tile ratio of 2.0.

Cities: Cities being big in the original game caused two issues: it made them frustrating to close, but also quite valuable. This also changed quite a bit in Hunters and Gatherers thanks to changes in tile distribution.

The following chart shows the different types of tiles for cities/forests. Here's how the two games compare:

	Orig.	H&G
Caps	23	32
Corners	10	23
Three-Part	7	1
Full	1	0

(Caps have at least one edge that is a single, unconnected city/forest; corners have two city/forest edges that are connected; three-parts have three city/forest edges that are connected; and fulls have a connected city/forest taking up the whole tile.)

The difference is striking and greatly affects the styles of play in the two games. In the original Carcassonne there is a lower percentage of caps and corners, and a higher-percentage of three-part and full city tiles, while in Hunters & Gatherers there are no four-part tiles, only one three-part tile, and a ton of caps and corners.

As a result cities tend to grow into huge masses in the original game, while in Hunters & Gatherers the majority of forests tend to be three tiles large, a size supported not only by the gold nugget rules (which we'll meet next article), but also by the tile distribution itself.

Another notable change from Carcassonne to Hunters & Gatherers is in the way the tiles with three city/forest edges are designed. In the original game, the were all three-part city tiles. Hunters & Gatherers meanwhile had about the same number of three-edged tiles (8 vs. 7), but they're almost all divided forests, to support the three-tile forest ideal already mentioned. Of its 8 three-edged tiles, one is a three-part forest, two are triple caps, and five show a cap and a corner.

I suspect I could look at similar tile distribution changes in all the other standalone games, but for now I'll leave it here: subtle changes can, and I think do, make pretty big changes throughout the Carcassonne standalones and are a simple way to polish up the gameplay.

Carcassonne Scoring

One of the most consistent changes from one Carcassonne standalone to another is scoring. Though the original three games are all pretty similar, from there things get more different. The following chart lays out all the differences, and as we'll see they've also resulted in various game design changes too.

Element	Orig.	H&G	Ark	Castle	City	Discovery
"City"	City: 2/tile + 2/pennant	Forest: 2/tile	City: 2/tile + 2/scroll	Tower: 2/tile	Market: 1-3/tile	Grasslands: 2/tile
"Road"	Road: 1/tile	River: 1/tile + 1-4/end	Road: 1/tile + 1/oasis	Path: 1/tile + 2x if well	Street: 1/tile + 2x if size 4+	N/A
"Field"	Field: 3/city	Meadow: 2/animal	Field: 2/animal	Court: 3/market	Residential: 2/market	Mountains: 2/city
Special	Monastery: 1/adj. tile	Hut: 1/fish	Temple: 7 points	House: 1/tile + bonus	Guards: 2-3/building	Sea: 1/tile + 1/city

Here's some thoughts on the results of the changes.

Cities: Cities have always scored based on how many tiles they contain. Two early games--the original Carcassonne and the very similar Ark of the Covenant--both feature bonuses (pennants and scrolls), but Wrede very quickly realized that bonuses weren't required. The cities were already valuable enough. The City is the one game that has the potential for cities to be even more valuable, but it's based on the number of different colored tiles in the city (market), from 1-3. This can be hard to attain, and also makes the city a huge target for blocking or stealing if it's one of the "good" 3-point ones.

Roads: Conversely roads were undervalued in the original Carcassonne at just 1 point/tile compared to 2+ for the cities. So we've seen roads go up in value throughout the standalones, just as cities as decreased a little bit. H&G and Ark both did this with iconography. In H&G the two end tiles of your road (river) gave you bonus points, while in Ark ever tile could have bonus value for roads. The solution in H&G felt like the better one because it was easier to see and felt less random.

Castle took an entirely different tack. You could put a well on your road, doubling its value (and also putting it on par with cities), but you also took the chance you'd get nothing at the end if you did, rather like the inns on the road from the first Carcassonne expansion. It not only gave roads the opportunity to be more valuable, but made it a strategic element.

Finally the City offered the least elegant solution. A 4+ space road is worth 2/tile. It works, but every other solution is prettier.

Fields: Fields were definitely one of the most troublesome elements in the original game because they could get really big and dramatically valuable. Sometimes the original Carcassonne game would come down to a battle over fields. In addition, the original method for scoring was pretty tricky since it correlated one element (the field) to another element (the city). Standalone games have offered two different solutions.

The first three Carcassonne standalones, H&G, Ark, and Castle all offered the solution of putting icons in the fields: animals, sheep, and markets. Then you scored 2-3 points for each icon in the field. It was a lot easier to score than the original, and also simpler to control from a game design point of view. The first two games also offered the fun catch that you could put "bad" animals into a field, giving players another orthogonal choice when placing tiles.

The last two Carcassonnes, City and Discovery have each gone back to the original methodology of scoring a field based on a nearby terrain. The City is almost identical to the original with you earning points for markets (cities) next to your residential areas (fields). Fortunately the non-edge-matching made fields smallers, though it could also make those markets more plentiful.

Discovery actually combines both methods: you get points for icons (cities) but you get points for all the icons in your mountains and in the grasslands that connect to it. This is actually a pretty confusing rule for many newcomers, but on the other hand it combines the advantages of the original rules (since you can beneficially build one terrain next to another) with that of the later ones (since the icons are easy to count, once you've figured out which to count).

Special: Each Carcasonne has had one type of special scoring.

For the original game that was the monastery, which gave you points for every adjacent tile. It was originally a problem because it gave so many points, and when you put a lot of expansions into the original game it became a different sort of problem because it was easy to get your guys stuck. Ark tried to clean this up with the temple, which gave you 7 points if you filled in 4 adjacent tiles. It was a little fewer points and a little less chance to get stuck, but still not that interesting since control of these areas randomly went to the players who drew the scant tiles.

H&G is the only game to introduce a new type of scoring piece, the hut. It's kind of interesting because it's a different resource to manage, and thus can offer an orthogonal option in your decision matrix--do I use a hut or not--but in actuality its use is very proscribed. You put it down if there's an option for a great river or you have nothing better to do.

Castle and Discovery each offered a new scoring terrain that was somewhere between a road and a city, which is to say between 1 and 2 points. For Castle that's a 1 point/tile house that can give a 5-8 point bonus at the end if it's the largest. I generally find it to be a pretty low-valued tile, just like the original road. For Discovery that's a sea that gets the normal 1 point/tile plus 1 point/icon. It's never as good as a city (grassland), but you might be adding cities to a nearby grassland (that benefits your mountains) at the same time. The interconnetiveness of Discovery is kind of cool.

Finally the guards in City are a totally new and kind of complex subsystem. They add a lot of value to the game because they can be very valuable but you have to carefully control when the city wall gets built in order to take advantage of them. They're also the only special scoring pieces which requires you to commit a normal meeple for the whole game--like in a field--which makes them interesting from yet another angle.

(The huts are game-long commitments too, but they don't require you to reduce your normal meeple allocation like a guard does.)

Overall the various scoring elements for Carcassonne have grown in three ways: cities have slightly decreased in value, roads have notably increased in value, and various other scoring elements have popped up to make the game more interesting.

Conclusion

Six games in, we've definitely seen a lot of changes to Carcassonne. Most of the big-name tile and scoring changes were already in place with the first standalone game, Hunters and Gatherers and I don't think those elements improved a lot from that place, though the variety is fun. However as we'll see in two week other rules changes have added a lot to the game.