Carcassonne Central

Here is my latest fan expansion, Carcassonne: Pennants, which has cards to be drawn during game play.

Preparation:  There is a pennant card for every tile in the Carcassonne base game and its expansions that contain a pennant. The cards are marked, so only the cards applicable to the sets you are playing with can be added to the draw pile.  

Game Play:  When a tile with a city segment showing a pennant is placed, the player immediately draws a pennant card. Each card describes a scenario and outcome for the player. The player then continues his or her turn, according to the regular rules.

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LATEST UPDATE - PRINT VERSION

Here is a new print-friendly version of Carcassonne: Pennants, that includes a few changes:

http://www.mediafire.com/?5onu1imdqrphzlk (http://www.mediafire.com/?5onu1imdqrphzlk)

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UPDATE:

Here is the download of Version 2, adding the suggestions so far:  http://www.mediafire.com/?05t7tfdwv8ub29p (http://www.mediafire.com/?05t7tfdwv8ub29p)

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The download begins with the card back, followed by the instructions and then the pennant cards for the base game and all the applicable expansions.

Thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions.  For example, will these cards be difficult to make in the document's present format?

CARC_Zoner

Looks great CARC_Zoner...feels like a Monopoly infusion into Carcassonne...I like it.

If I might make a suggestion for the Tower card, which reads "Your tower dominates the landscape with its majesty. Gain 1 point for every tower piece in your supply."...Would it be better to receive one point for every deployed tower piece, as opposed to each one in your supply?  My reasoning is that the card intro talks about your dominant tower.  If you haven't placed any tower pieces, there would be no tower to speak of, but yet you would gain 10 points (been a while since I played the Tower, but I think that's how many pieces you start with).

I always played that the towers are just in a shared supply, which is reinforced by the fact that they are all the same color. I think deployed towers would be a better thing to count as well.

Thanks Amorpheus and Whaleyland, your logic is flawless.  I will make this change and review the other cards with scoring implications in mind.

CARC_Zoner

Nice Job CARC_Zoner. This looks fun.

I have a question though.

Regarding the Plague card - how is the follower saved? Does it prevent a player from placing a flea on his tile on one play? But then on the next player's turn he may get killed anyway. Am I getting that right?

Carcking,

That was my plan for the Plague.  We have the expansion, but have not played with it yet.  Do you have a suggestion for an improvement?  Should the card protect a follower until the current plague goes latent/inactive?

CARC_Zoner

We've played the Plague several times and really enjoy it. Given the mechanic I'm not sure how I would go about protecting a follower. I'd have to think about it. Maybe you could protect it until the next plague tile is drawn, but how will you remember which follower, and what if he flees to somewhere else, etc.

Here is what I've come up with for the pennant card for The Plague:

   Monks care for sufferers of the Black Death.

   This card grants you passage to the nearest cloister during an outbreak.

CARC_Zoner

P.S. I have posted the print version of the fan expansion in the original posting.

Is that a good thing? In my experience with the plague thus far, being in a cloister seems to be one of the worst places to be.

I guess the problem with the cloister is that there is no chance of fleeing within this feature during an outbreak.

Well, as it stands, the potentally sick meeple may only be able to pray for healing (or even for a swift death) onced moved to the cloister!  ;)

I am more than willing to make a change to this card based on any suggestions.

CARC_Zoner

My wife and I played a game of Carcassonne tonight, using a variety of expansions, including Carcassonne: Pennants.

Drawing a pennant card each time a tile with a pennant symbol was placed added a light, but fun element to the game.

However, at one point I drew the pennant card that said, "You are recruited to fight in the Hundred Year's War.  Remove a knight from play and return it to your supply."  Unfortunately, the only knight I had in play was in a large city with a cathedral from the Inns & Cathedrals expansion.  The very next play, my wife claimed the city.  Eventually I was able to join my new city to this large one.  This was lucky, because the next turn, she drew the tile that would have prevented this!  We both claimed the 54 points for the city.

We forgot once during the game to draw a pennant card, as one was left at the end.  Overall, we like this expansion and will probably continue to use it in most of our games.

CARC_Zoner

P.S. For those who are wondering, I got whipped in the game.  The final score was 359 to 272. We even ran out of 50 point tiles! Ouch!

Here is a similar expansion idea from several years ago posted by LittleMisfit, which I discovered on BoardGameGeek.com (http://BoardGameGeek.com):

http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/5672/carcassonne_bonustilesvariant-pdf  (http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/5672/carcassonne_bonustilesvariant-pdf)

The mechanism to indicate the drawing of "bonus cards" are markers placed every 10 points on the scoring track.

The text on the bonus cards are very creative, too.  Some examples:  "Remove any unoccupied tile from the board and place it back in the supply" and "Swap the location of any two men on the board" and "Subtract five points from the opponent of your choice".

CARC_Zoner

Are these sized to fit the community chest/chance cards from Monopoly?

Thanks

The thing with those bonus tiles that bothers me is how people might define unoccupied tiles.
Usually I'd say that an unoccupied tile is a tile which has no meeples on it.
But in case of taking 'unoccupied' tiles away from the board, I'd consider tiles with features that are occupied on adjacent tiles (or even further away as long as the feature is still connected) as being occupied.

I also think that it should not be possible to take a tile away if that would cause the 'board' to be split in parts.

I did not deliberately attempt to make the Carcassonne: Pennants cards the same physical size as Monopoly ones.

CARC_Zoner

Good points.  Another danger of removing tiles is the possible bumping of other nearby tiles (requiring a timeout to fix the tiles).

CARC_Zoner

I'm thinking old business cards might be perfect

LOL .... I know that problem of every regular game of Carcassonne I play  ;D  I always seem to bump the tiles in some way (probably just clumsiness) but I'm sure that in this case with taking tiles away and placing them somewhere else just makes it worse   ;)

I still like the idea though. I'm sure I'll print it out and give it a try some time this summer  8)

With business cards you have to shrink depth and widen but once glued work well

I've always been interested in moving tiles.  Can't do it too often, but it could be really interesting.  One of the original ideas for Natural Disasters: Earthquake was to split the board in two and seperate the two side by one tile length to place the earthquake tile in the gap.  As you can imagine, the difficulty of doing so caused that idea to be scrapped.

The Carcassonne: Pennants expansion cards were created using MS PowerPoint, so have the slide dimensions.

They could be printed and glued to playing cards, if you prefer something larger than business cards.  Just printing, cutting, folding and sealing with a glue stick works well enough.

CARC_Zoner

One could set a rule so that only an outside tile may be lifted and moved.  Perhaps it would be legal only if it the tile could be "slid" away from the main playing area.

A toy dart with a suction cup may work, too!

CARC_Zoner

the business cards are a nice size, sort or monopoly-like

Added to web site downloads and forum downloads.