Carcassonne Central

I'm set to receive my 500 blank tiles in a few days and need to start planning what I'm going to make with them.  500 is a lot, but when you consider all the expansions there are, it's not enough.  I'm interested in making the Forest and some of it's expansions, but I think 150 is too many for the base set.  I think I'd be OK with 60-75.  It seems like adding all the forest tiles to a mega-carc game changes it from a 6 hour game to a weekend.  Does anyone else have this issue?  Can I get some opinions from some regular Forest players?

Novelty, do you think you'd be willing to issue a trimmed down version?

Make a tile combination matrix.  Since the expansion only adds one tile edge you should be able to get away with about 60.  Just make sure you have at least one of any tile combo.

If you really want to slim down the Forest, simply use a Forest-City-Field-Road (or some similar combination) starting tile. That gets the forest tiles out there much more easily and detracts a little from the possibility that a forest tile won't be placeable early on. I've only played Forest twice: the first time I didn't finish because it was approaching a 4-hour game (I don't typically like Carc games that go over 2 hours unless they were planned) and the second time I cut our half the tiles and started with a Forest tile, which seemed to work.

I think a lot of the forest tiles have forests that are unclaimable, that only block fields (corner to corner). They shouldn't be neccesary.

That reminds me. If you want to have a small and well-balanced Forest expansion, only print out the Forest tiles that match the City tiles from the base game. Print them out in the same quantity and it should work alright. Use for a starting tile the one I mentioned earlier. That way, You will only be adding around 25 new tiles and they will be in perfect balance with the cities. You can add more, of course, but I'd still recommend balancing them with the city tiles (and making them the same or similar to them).

Just wondering, shouldn't this topic be in the crafter's workshop?

Indeed, some of the tiles have configurations based on tiles from official expansions rather than the base game itself. I would be inclined to forego those ones at first.

Did anyone come up with a trimmed down list?

I'd like to try 100 max

Ignore Page 6 and 7 and you should have 30 less.  And ignore 20 tiles from pages 3 and 4, and you'll be at your 100 limit.

Is there a particular reason you have selected 6&7 for deletion?

The main reason is that it's not really "forests" - i.e. there are no scorable forests on those tiles, they are mainly field dividers.