Carcassonne Central

I'm thinking of getting the Winter pdf and putting them on tiles and adding them to my collection but, as with some other posts I've seen here, I don't like the fact it is a stand alone and won't work with anything else. (Well... admittedly... yes it can, but it would look horrible  >:( ).

So I had the thought of a Fan made crossover expansion

A set of 24 tiles where it segues from green farmland to the white winter landscape. That way you can use the winter set in your games of Mega-Carcassonne.

The tiles would vary from 1 green to 3 white, 2 green to 2 white and 3 green to 1 white edges and on them would be farms, roads, cities and cloisters.

Each edge has to match between winter and spring be it on a farm, road or city.

I have no artistic skills or software to make them up so can anyone or everyone here help?

There are only 4 types of Summer-Winter crossover tiles: SSSW, SSWW, SWSW, SWWW.
But for every of this types there are a lot of different tiles, because you need every combination of Cities, Farms and Roads - Cloisters are not so important for this. (For the SWSW you need less because of the symmetry.) And for playing fun you need more than one special form, e.g. CCCF: 3 little city edges and one farmland / 1 city with 3 edges /1 city with two edges and left of it 1 city with 1 edge / 1 city with 1 edge and the left side 1 city with 2 edges. (C/C/C F, C_C_C F, C_C/C F, C/C_C F) So there'll have to be more than 24 tiles at all.
(You can try it yourself by using C(City in Summer), F(Farm in Summer), R(Road in summer) and D(City in Winter), G(Farm in winter) and S(Road in winter) and make the combinations of all with at least one of the winter and one of the summer edges. For that reason in the original game there are only 3 different edges.)

My suggestion: You could use a starter of 8 tiles, one side summer, one side winter. You put in on the table so that there is enough room for the winter tiles on one side and for the summer tiles on the other side. It's not forbidden to let the winter come on the other side, but this will be risky - or you have to use an abbey tile. This could be named "Onset of Winter" and is like in nature. Perhaps there could be mountains on the start tiles to illustrate a different altitude.

I've been toying with this idea as well, and Fritz_Spinne's suggestion is exactly what I had come up with for the best implementation of a segue.  Likewise having no artistic/software skills, I had not yet undertaken more than just a research of the French area of Carcassonne to see what higher elevations exist (existed?) around there.  Apparently it never or rarely ever snows in Carcassonne.  I found that some of the higher elevations are called "Pech xxxxxx" where I believe Pech means Hill.  One such Pech somewhat close to Carcassonne's border is called Pech Anges (possibly Angel Hill in English).  Led to a goofy potential fanspansion name of Snow Angel Hill (probably a better name would be Chateau of the Angels).  I like Onset of Winter however, and maybe the historical/regional tie-in need only be referenced in the opening fanspansion narrative.

If I come up with a way of creating the tiles, I'll be sure to share here.  If anyone else has this need (to incorporate the Winter Edition into the regular game/expansions) and has better capabilities, please share.

Played around today with this idea and came up with a tile that embodies some of the thoughts with this crossover.  This would be one of the 8 or so tiles in the chain of tiles separating the winter lands from the rest of Carcassonne.  Each tile could use a cliff feature (such as this one created by Novelty for his Forest expansion and adapted for this idea).  I also borrowed part of one tile from Novelty's Winter 2008 expansion for the snow hut and the light snow.  I don't imagine he would mind, but I'll happily take this down if he logs in and asks me to.

Again, I'm lacking a decent software program to do much more than the limited quality I've shown here.  If anyone else can run with this idea (first posted by Captain Pedantic), please do.

(http://api.photoshop.com/v1.0/accounts/f7d0d1c4536f4179acd548a14c5cc55a/assets/32fdd70ff1594777bab494eeaa9f6586)

*Edit: Changed snow color & depth to match closer to the Winter Edition tiles.

Looks great. I had also thought of a long board such as used in "The Oceans" to start it off.

The more I think about it, the more keeping them separate is a good idea. With 24 or more tiles you might end up with patches of snow all over the place. Having it elevated into the hills is aesthetic.

This is a fantastic idea! Adds a whole new dynamic

I thought of something like this:

(http://www10.pic-upload.de/thumb/08.02.12/h347g5xx86au.jpg)] (http://www.pic-upload.de/view-12903729/Start-Kombination-winter-normal.jpg.html)

I like that.   ;D

Will these ideas create an issue when someone tries to place a tile at the end of each row of 4?  We have the mountains as a transition for these 8 tiles, but is there any feature we can add to prevent someone from playing on the ends?  Even in doing that, it is still likely that some features from one may encroach on the other.

Maybe having the mountains wrap to the upper left/right and lower left/right (based on the orientation of your picture) on both the grass and snow sides (thereby covering half of four tiles diagonally) could at least make it less likely to be an issue.  That may look odd though.  And that would only work if you are not playing with the Mountains fanspansion  :o

If you place a tile at the end of the summer row you can't place a winter tile at the same end and vice versa. It's not perfect but it will work.

I like the idea of a long board down the "middle" of the table. In reality it would probably sit more towards one side of the table since there are only 72 winter tiles and several hundred regular tiles. ;D

I agree, a long board down the middle would be a great way to merge this into a Mega Carc game! Just print more Winter tiles hehe

I think the picture above is a good start of a board to go down the middle. Except I think it needs to not just be a wall of mountains, thus stopping any constructions going from spring to winter.

So maybe 10 tiles long, half mountains to show it is going into the higher plateau, 2 roads going into the mountains, maybe 2 mountain passes to allow the farms to continue through and maybe a city that has stairs in the middle to move between the two tiers.

I can't think of any rule changes required, other than mountains end a farm. (For those for do not use the mountain expansion.)

It doesn't seem like a winter/spring idea to me as much as a change in elevation.  At least that's what it looks like.

Agreed. It doesn't make sense to be both winter and spring at the same time.

Think of it as that time at the end of winter, where in the higher altitudes there is still snow, but down in the lowlands the thaw has begun..  ;)

And also as it is officially the winter release, calling the base set spring seemed a good way to differentiate between the two types of tiles.

I'm not concerned one way or the other, just that it'd be good to be able to use them together.

It's cool.  I have no problem with using it.  I think it would be fun to put them together no matter what you call it.

So I've been thinking more on this. (As I just printed off the winter expansion and am waiting for the blank tiles to be delivered).

I thought about having the board to begin with and the more I thought the more I didn't like it. For 2 reasons...
1) you can't place meeples on any of the features
2) it's the same every time

So I thought of making 12 tiles (more if we include expansion like cults and tower). The tiles are lowlands (spring/green) on one edge and highlands (winter/white) generally on the opposite edge.
In the middle of all bar two tiles is a cliff face or mountain or something to show it goes upland and it goes from an edge to an edge.
Two tiles the cliff/mountain goes from one edge then bends to the winter corner. These are the start and finish tiles.
On the tiles can be features such as city, cloisters and roads. Roads can go over the mountains, cities show they have 2 levels to go uplands. At one or two points there are mountain passes to allow the farms to go from one side to the other.

Play goes like the rules to original river expansion. In which the start tile is placed, and then one by one the others are played, you can place a meeple or not. This continues until you run out of crossover pieces and you place the ending piece.
Maybe the mountains can bend so it is not always a straight line.

This fixes the two problems I had above.

I've downloaded gimp and a few training programs but are there any good scans of the features and backgrounds I can use? I don't have a scanner.

For a quick try:
Just open the the pdf-files, zoom in at 400%, take a snapshot (camera in your pdf-reader?) and paste in gimp.