Carcassonne Central

Somehow, the old thread seems to have expired or migrated, or immigrated or something. Anyway, Novelty, I was wondering if you were up for making some new tiles? No new features or anything, just some plain simple old-fashioned Carc tiles like you used to make for MathGuy. I've done my homework and attempted (although I know I have missed a few) to create a list of all the possible Carc tile configurations, not counting the features released in expansions. That's right, Vanilla Carcassonne features only! I am including bridges, tunnels, multi-branch roads, and dead-ends, none of which featured in the original Carcassonne, but since they don't really require any new rules, I don't see that they cause a problem.

I am going to look through the MathGuy expansions before posting a list of probably 15 (initially) tile suggestions but I probably have around 30 new tiles I wanted to create. After that, I wanted to recreate tiles that released in various official expansions, but never without expansion features polluting their appearance. Thus, anyone who wants can play Carcassonne with every tile variant without having to tell everyone and remember yourself: "Just ignore those [Inns, Cathedrals, Trade Icons, Princess Icons, Volcanoes, Dragon Icons, Magic Portals, Towers, Shrines, Fairgrounds, Cathars], we're not playing with that variant this game!" Bringin' the game of Carcassonne back to vanilla, that's my goal.

Though I do like most of the expansion features, that sounds like a great idea.  Gives people options.

The thread, as always, is in my signature and in the Crafting workshop.  However, do feel free if you want to start a new thread there... wait, I forget... let's just move this thread there :)

Crafter's Guild...got it. Why is it there? We're not crafting anything except new tiles. I thought Crafter's Guild was for creating new physical things like boxes and stuff?

Physical things, including tiles.  A "nothing new" tile set with vanilla Carc features seems like a new tile set.  Unless, of course, the intention is not to produce physical tiles, in which case, I don't see the reason for the thread then...

I guess it may fit in the expansion workshop, but I thought it might be nice to have some traffic in this crafter's workshop as well.

Fair enough. I guess tiles are indeed physical, but I only need JPGs to make my tiles. I am hoping I can get 60 tiles worth of these made so I can use them with my tiles I got from HiG when I was in Britain.

Okay, here is the first list of tiles. I decided on an even 12 for each set since that is consistent with previous Vanilla-builder expansions. The first set will hitherto uncreated tiles, official or otherwise. If someone knows of a fan version of it without any additional expansion (fan or official) features, let me know. Here's what I propose for the first set:

1. RRFF with no linked road (two dead-ends)
2. RRRF with no linked roads (all dead-ends)
3. RRRF with left to right road bridged and top road dead-ended
4. RRRR with left to right roads continuous,  top and bottom roads dead-ended
5. CFRR with left road continuous and bottom road bridged to city
6. CRRF with right road bridged over bottom road to city (both continuous)
7. CCCC with 2 small cities on each side of one long (tube) city, no fields
8. CCCR with 1 large triangle city and 1 small city, road splits and goes to both cities
9. CCCR with 1 large triangle city and 1 small city, road to small city
10. CCRR with large square city, 2 fields, bottom road to city, left road dead-ended
11. CRRC with large square city, 2 fields, bottom road to city, right road dead-ended
12. CRFC with 2 small cities, road dead-ends

I have plenty of counter-proposals. MathGuy came up with a lot of these, but he interestingly created a whole bunch of tiles that didn't even make it into my register, suggesting to me that it still isn't that complete. Still, I have at least four more sets of tiles to propose, and I will get the lists up as soon as I have time to cross-check them. Novelty, I hope you are up for this challenge. They should be fairly easy, but not completely.

Don't you have a master's thesis to write or something?  ;D

I'll get to work on these when I get the time as usual.  Do you want a watermark on them?  How about the letter V for Vanilla?

Yes, I do. And I haven't done any research for it in two days now, although that isn't entirely CarcCentral's fault.  :)

Sounds good. A V would be just fine, although if you can find a V that is somewhat in the Carc font style, that would be most awesome. Nothing too overwhelming, though. I mean, this is suppose to be Vanilla after all.

How many field segments are there on those tiles?

Edit: Can you do me a favour and check both copy of Wells to see if some of your tile configs are already there?

Here's what I have so far:

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/carc/images/vanilla1test.jpg)

Awesome!  This is a great idea.
I like what you've done so far Novelty....can't wait to see more!
 ;)

3. It should be 3 fields. The bridge should jump over a road that dead-ends on one side, basically.
4. 2 fields. The basic left-right road is there but then two roads come from top and bottom but really are just peaking in. They shouldn't reach the continuous road, thereby allowing the fields on each side of  them to link together.

You're right, I didn't check the two Wells expansions (not counting Fountain of Youth). Luckily, there is only one overlap. I may compile a number of these tiles from various expansions, and put them together to build this expansion. Maybe. Here's my replacement suggestion:

6. CRRF with small city and both roads merging then going into the city; no road junction, both cities go into city; should be 3 fields.

Also, concerning your tile for 7, conceptually you're right on, but I was hoping to have the walls for the long city (the tube) still up, instead of crushed beneath the two smaller cities. If that creates a small field on each side, I guess that's okay. If someone really wants to claim a 2-city field, they can. I will keep updating my list with the tiles from the 3 MathGuys, 2 Wells, Thanksgiving & Winter expansions. Again, if anyone knows of any fan-expansions that have just normal Vanilla tiles, tell me and I will add them to my database. Thanks!

You mean like this (http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/lindsay/)?

That will do quite nicely. The capital and lower case versions have merits, so either could be used.

I don't want to specifically purchase a font just for one letter...  but I'll see what I can do!

lol, no purchasing fonts. Maybe some "Grab" work/screen shot could get it.  ;D

Have a look HERE (http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=401&page=1)  ....might take some digging, but the fonts are free  ;)

On that page you can type in a short sample bit of text, or perhaps a letter or two, pick the size and it will output a sample in that font.  You could always do that and "freehand" a likeness of the image.  Perhaps not entirely legal but I know of a website or two that has used it that way...

OK, I'll do that.  I'm more concerned with how the tiles are supposed to look.  Whaley, you'll have to be queued behind Dragon's Lair for the time being.  11 more tiles left there, then the rules, before I can get back to this.  I hope you don't mind the wait.

That's fine. After Matt's new cover, I am going back to mostly thesis work for a few days. Not very excited about it, but my research on William III is getting behind schedule and I am having problems with primary sources. Oh the fun of research...

Wow, you're writing about the guy who deposed the king of another country and ruled with his wife?  And how he was childless and the throne passed on to his childless sister-in-law?  Perhaps you could go find stuff from his cousins, a few times removed?  There are still plenty of those around in a number of European countries :)

Back to the topic:


I went huh at the section I bolded.  Do you mean roads instead of cities there?

LOL! Yes, roads...I mean roads. Obviously I have to stop staying up so late while writing posts.

I was just going through the list again (I'm making physical tiles this weekend), and I realised that Cleric and Serf has a number of Vanilla tiles as well.  Have a look in there and let me know if there's any changes.

So it does, but I downloaded and looked through those tiles and couldn't find any that seemed the same as the ones I am requesting. I will have to mark off a few of them, though, from my future tiles list. We really need to extract all of these various tiles from the many expansions we've made and make them into one 60-72ish set of expansion-less feature tiles. I think that would be popular. The tiles you are making now would obviously help build that collection up some.

Let's see, there's

All 3 mathguy expansions (36 tiles), Perky Dragons (12 tiles), Winter and Thanksgiving 2008 (24 tiles), the 2 wells expansions (24 tiles) and Cleric & Serf (10 tiles).  All those are pretty much standalones.  That's 106 tiles.

Then there are 2 tiles in Family Feud and 5 in Treasure Hunt, from what I remember.

There's probably already 60-72ish tiles there already for your choosing.  Perhaps a "Vanilla Big Box" might be in order...

Perhaps. With my proposed 12 tiles, we will have 125 tiles total to choose from. Winter and Thanksgiving I like, but the different seasons aspects distract me, although if those were removed, some of those tiles have new features on them. My list still has a bunch of tiles not yet created, but I have confused myself since tiles are suppose to be read clock-wise, yet I wrote all my descriptions counter-clockwise (stupid, stupid, stupid!). Regardless, I can keep proposing those as I have the time. An expansion of 72 tiles would be fun, although I think I would prefer to call it Carcassonne: The Sequel since it is like the original game, with just more of the same (and hypothetically playable by itself).

Doesn't Perky Dragon have symbols on the tiles?

You'll have to check.  I think some of them don't.

If you consider an Inn a symbol, then there are only two with none, one being a river tile.  If not, than six.

I'm gonna call this done :)  You can download the tiles from the Public Downloads.

Nice one Novelty and 'Whaleylan' (you might want to fix that Novelty)

lol, indeed. Thanks for getting this out. Sorry I couldn't get back to you but I've been busy lately with random variousnesses, mostly a new class I'm taking (Oceanography). You're expansion is perfect, though, although I wouldn't be surprised to see Vanilla II sometime in the future. Maybe even a Vanilla III. I'll have to update my Carcassonne list as soon as I can, and of course print these out. Thanks!

Sorry about the Typo.  I'm still slowly going through Robert's Wheel of Time series (which is now 14 books!) and Lan seems to be popping up everywhere, although I have no idea what does Whaley and Lan have in common...

And yes, I look forward to Vanilla 2 and 3, Strawberry and Chocolate and maybe Neopolitan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_ice_cream) as well :)  Take your time with the update of the list - it'll probably take me another half a year to make them.  And I guess now you have 12 more reasons why Chr15lynn tiles should arrive sooner rather than later :)

Actually, I never ordered any tiles from Chr15lynn. Since I was in the UK for a year, I bought three packs of 60 tiles directly from HiG. Since I only play Carcassonne about twice a month (I know, sad, but I have a bunch of games and oddly little time to play any of them), I haven't even gotten around to using half of them. I thought about ordering some from Chr15lynn, in fact I even thought about requesting them after the order was placed, but I really don't see a need since I almost never play with all the expansions. From what I remember, I think I've only played a mega game twice, and that was pre-Catapult, CS&C, Cult and Cathars. I printed the Forest once (but didn't place them on tiles) but it took too long so we stopped mid-game.

I love these new tiles, and can't wait to print them out and use them.
I've been mucking about trying to make some of the sets from the the HiG downloads page (mehrfluss and the first 2 landschaften) look more like the official tiles, but it's been a bit of a struggle trying to get them to look good, so I'm suitably impressed & humbled by what you've achieved with these & all of the other tiles you've produced {nw.
I've also been mucking about creating some tuckboxes (with a bit more success) & was wondering if you wanted one for this set? I've noticed that most if not all of the other tile sets you've created have them, & I should be able to get one sorted out pretty quickly if you want.

There is a free version of the font that I came across, which is pretty much identical. Called 'Lindsay Becker'. You may want to try that?