Carcassonne Central

As I understand it, it cannot be the Cathar expansion because the rights to that expansion are owned by Spielbox, not by HIG or Rio Grande. In fact, following the wording of the announcement it would have to be the same 12 tile 'mini-expansion' that appeared in Games Quarterly.

Here is part of a message I received a couple of weeks ago from Jay Tummelson when I asked him about the Cathars expansion;

"Perhaps you missed my comments on the Geek and elsewhere.
Spielbox has decided they own Cathars and will not allow me to
make it available in any circumstance. I will speak with
Knucklebones regarding other inserts, however."

That would be good, as I don't have the GQ expansion yet…  ;)

That's interesting, as I was told that HiG wants to keep "control" of all Carc products.

Maybe it's produced under license? Not that I know one bit about stuff like that ...

That would definitely make sense.  Can anyone who has Cathars confirm this? There would be some fine print on the packaging or rules that states this if it is true.

On my edition - the set that came with the Almanac - there's no small print anywhere, just a note that further information can be found under carcassonne.de. I think you'll find that the Cathars is exclusively licensed to Spielbox for the purposes of distribution, mainly so they can release compendiums like the Alamanc, which the Carc faithful will buy up just to get at that oh-so-rare expansion.

 ??? what is this!  ???

So, Spielbox magazine is released quarterly or something like that. One issue had The Cathars in it. A couple of years later - in 2005 I think it was - they released a Carcassonne special (the Almanac) containing all the articles on Carcassonne from the previous years (with English translations to boot), including The Cathars. That's where I picked up my copy of the expansion.

Spielbox know that there's a big community of players who would give anything to get hold of The Cathars, and I guess we'll be seeing another Almanac at some point - Jay Tummelson's comments on BGG suggested that Spielbox didn't want to allow GQ to use The Cathars because it would undervalue their own subsequent reprints.

So what I meant was that, if and when there is a reprint, us people in Germany with easy access to it will have to get hold of a few copies. Maybe we cold offer the expansion as a prize in competitions or something - now that really would get people involved ('Post 4 variants and with a copy of The Cathars!')  ;)

If you don't have The Cathars yet, don't despair!