Carcassonne Central

Here's a proposal to treat rivers similar to roads.  With the large amount of river tiles - Rivers 1, Rivers 2, GQ11, it may be possible actually mix in the river pieces with the normal tiles and play them as normal tiles.  Rivers 2 is still widely available in many places, and with the addition of K,C&C, it will be even easier to obtain.  This variant will also allow for all river tiles to be put into play.  This variant does not require new tiles or new meeples.

Requirement
*At least 3 copies of River1 or 2.  (So Rivers 1, Rivers 2, K,C&C, & GQ11 would qualify.  So would 3 copies of Rivers 2)
*Basic game
*No new tiles or other pieces required.

Proposed variant rules
Setup
*At the beginning of the game, do not separate out the River tiles, mix them in with the rest of the tiles.
*Use the original starting tile from the basic game instead.

During Play
*During play, when a river tile is drawn, place it on the board in accordance to normal Carcassone rules.
*The player placing the tile gets the additional option to place the meeple (small and big) on the river (as a fishermen).  The builder, mayor, barn, pig and wagon may not be placed on the river.
*If a spring, lake or junction river tile is drawn and it cannot be put into play, it is not removed.  Draw another tile and play it instead.  Repeat drawing tiles until a playable tile is drawn, if required.  Shuffle all unused spring, lake or junction river tiles back into the draw pile.  [This is to prevent the limited "ends" from being discarded.]

Scoring
*Rivers are completed when there are 2 ends to the stretch of a river.  The ends can either be the abbey, a spring tile, a lake tile or at a junction.  (Therefore the possible stretches of river includes spring - abbey, spring - lake, spring - junction, junction - lake, junction - abbey, lake - abbey)
*When the river is completed (similar to how roads are completed), the player with the most fishermen on the river earns 2 points per tile.  The big meeple counts as 2 meeples when determining who has control of the river.
*All fishermen on the stretch of completed river is removed back to hand.

Interactions with Other expansions
*Dragon - the normal rules for the dragon applies to meeples on river tiles <I don't play with P&D, so I'm not sure if this will cause any problems>
*Fairy - the normal rules for the fairy applies to meeples on river tiles <I don't play with P&D, so I'm not sure if this will cause any problems>
*Tower - the normal rules for the tower applies to meeples on river tiles
*City (CoC) - When a river is completed, before the determination of majority, all players may redeploy their meeples from the market to the river being scored (with the exception that if the count is there, they can't move it as per normal Count rules) <I don't play with count... suggestions?>
*Abbey - the abbey completes the river, but is not part of the river.  The normal abbey rules for roads applies to rivers as well.

This variant makes me thirsty  :)

Even with a ton of river expansions, I don't think there will be enough springs and lakes.

The overall idea reminds me of Hunters and Gatherers, which I've only ever played on the computer so I don't fully understand it.

Yeah, there'll be a lack of "ends", but that will only mean high scoring points with the rivers. 
I'm also thinking of creating custom tiles with rivers and maybe a tile like the King and Robber Baron for rivers.  I'll mock up a few tiles when I get the time.  It shouldn't be too difficult...

Anyways, nothing constructively critical about the variant?

OK, here's some custom tiles that may be used with this variant:

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/rivers3.jpg)

These are fake tiles, created with photoshop.  If anyone is interested, I suppose I could create more.

Wow, those look as good as the official tiles!

I took the scans from the GQ11 and modified those to make this.

Well, the idea is to eventually create an expansion around the concept, maybe with a fishing boat meeple per player that would take the place of the builder on the river.  Perhaps even a fish shaped meeple to be the pig of the river.  As I mentioned, a Fisherman tile (similar to King/cities and Robber Baron/roads) or maybe an Admiral instead for the longest river?  Nothing new in terms of rules, just the reuse of an existing feature found on tiles and the expansion of it to enable a better playing experience.  But that's a different post.

This post though, is about using the extra copies of Rivers 1, 2 and from GQ11 for a better play experience.

What, my thirsty comment wasn't enough?  ;)  It looks interesting to me, and my favourite type of variant is one that makes interesting use of the less-frequently used tiles.  I'd have to play it to give better feedback, but offhand I think the concept is sound.

Aren't you always thirsty Gantry? :o  I'm looking forward to better feedback then.  I promise not to run away crying.

The fisher meeple variant has already been covered in my variant ages ago now.

I like the idea of placing river tiles from the main stack, but I think in reality it would become difficult and may end in quite a few discarded tiles. I tried just randomly pulling tiles from the bag tonight and out of 50 tiles pulled only 6 were river. This would lead to a very untidy map with th epossibility of unfinished rivers making farming harder etc.

Just my thoughts. ;)

Hmm... that's a good point.  I wonder if there's a minimal amount of rivers required.  Did you have 3 sets of rivers in your bag, steve?

In H&G, rivers are the equivalent of roads. It might be good to either look at the number of road tiles in Carc, or look at the tile distribution of H&G and see what the ratio of river to non-river tiles is.

Yep got three.5 sets in there, 1 x R1, 2 x R2 and the GQ11

Roads
Carc = 45/72
River1 = 4/12
I&C = 12/18
T&B = 16/24
K&S = 3/5
Cat = 2/4
P&D = 18/30
Rivers2 = 3/12
Tower = 11/18
GQ11 = 9/12
A&M = 8/12

Rivers
River1 = 12/12
Rivers2 = 12/12
GQ11 = 2/12

So in the original game 63% of the tiles have at least one edget that is a road.

The original game + R1 + R2 + R2 + GQ11 has ... 32% rivers.  That's only about half of the roads %age.  Definately too few, especially if the other expansions are added into play.

H&G has a greater %age of rivers in the game.

Hmm... I guess it'll need a rethink.  Any idea what sort of balance for the river tiles would be good?

What would be good though, would be if either RGG or HiG take this idea and produce an expansion with extra river tiles - say about 40 - 60 tiles  :o

Besides quantity of tiles, also look at straight thru versus curve versus junction.

Erm... OK, here goes... using the codes r = road, s = river, x = anything else,

rxxx:
Base = 5
R1 = 2
I&C = 3
T&B = 10
K&S = 1
P&D = 1
R2 = 1
Tower = 3
GQ11 = 4
A&M = 2

rrxx:
Base = 20
R1 = 1
I&C = 3
T&B = 3
K&S = 1
Cathars = 1
P&D = 9
R2 = 1
Tower = 2
GQ11 = 1
A&M = 3

rxrx:
Base = 12
R1 = 1
I&C = 4
T&B = 1
Cathars = 1
P&D = 3
R2 = 1
Tower = 3
GQ11 = 2
A&M = 1

rrrx:
Base = 7
I&C = 1
K&S = 1
T&B = 1
P&D = 4
Tower = 1
GQ11 = 1
A&M = 1

rrrr:
Base = 1
I&C = 1
T&B = 1
P&D = 1
Tower = 2
GQ11 = 1
A&M = 1

vs
sxxx:
R1 = 2
R2 = 3
GQ11 = 1

ssxx:
R1 = 4
R2 = 4

sxsx:
R1 = 6
R2 = 4
GQ11 = 1

sssx:
R2 = 1

Erm... so 3 sets of Rivers is roughly comparable with the roads in Base?  I'm confused as to what exactly I'm supposed to be doing...

edit

Cross-posting more fantasy tiles for this game:

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/rivers3set2.jpg)

I want to make a 3rd batch of 4 with some lakes, inns-by-lakes, and some bridges!  Does anyone know where I can get good quality scans of Rivers and Rivers2?  BoardGameGeek doesn't seem to have any of a good enough quality that I can use.

Edit: More tiles...

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/rivers3set3.jpg)

Edit: Junction tiles...

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/rivers3set4.jpg) (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/rivers3q4.jpg)

I love these tiles.
I always play the river tiles as normal tiles.
we added the unofficial expansion fischerhutte to it, so we could earn points and fishtokens for each completed river.
But new tiles are more than welcome, makes it less boring than adding the same river tiles double.

Well, after the 5 forest expansions, I'll put out at least 1 river expansion with the rule changes for this.  Hopefully that will be soon :)

way cool !!!
 :bc :)w :)s {wv

The tiles are COOL!!!!

Thanks Maulei.  It took ages to get them right, that much I can tell you!  I'll repackage these as a proper expansion once Scott and I have finished the Forest tiles.

Well, I don't seem to have the originals for some of these tiles, so I thought I'd recreate them from scratch again.  It shouldn't be that difficult (or so methinks!).  Here's the cloister with lake RRRS tile from set 1:

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/lakecloister.jpg)

I've redone Set 1 and will move on to Sets 2, 3 and 4, maybe tomorrow...

Here's the Tiles, first page (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen1.pdf) featuring sources and lakes.

Thumbnail:
(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen1tn.jpg)

As you can see, it's all of Set 1, and half of set 2.

Current plan:
Page 2 will have the other half of set 2 and set 3
Page 3 will have the T-junctions of set 4
Page 4 will have mostly straights and curves :)
All this might change

BTW, rivers + forest is in Whispering Woods and will not be part of this.

I would have thought that after going through the hundreds of Forests tiles, these rivers tiles will be a piece of cake, a walk in the park, two shakes of a duck's tail.  Well, I was wrong.  I guess I'm finding that it's a whole different kettle of fish (no pun intended!) to create river tiles.  I've just finished Set 2 with 10 straight river sections and 5 ends.  Here's one that was the most fun to put together:

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/newcattile.jpg)

I assure you there are shrines in this expansion as well.  There are also tower foundations, at least one anyways, but nothing from P&D is currently planned - maybe those will go in a future expansion.  I'll post up Set 2 later when I have them PDF'ed.

Here's the Tiles, second page (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen2.pdf) featuring mostly straight through rivers.

Thumbnail:
(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen2tn.jpg)

Current plan:
Page 3 will have river bends from sets 2 and set 3
Page 4 will have the T-junctions of from set 3 and set 4
All this might change

Here's the Tiles, third page (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen3.pdf) featuring curved rivers.

Thumbnail:
(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen3tn.jpg)

Current plan:
Page 4 will have the T-junctions of from Set 4
Draft the rules, including the special tiles

Here's the Tiles, fourth page (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen4.pdf) featuring junctions and underground rivers.

Thumbnail:
(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen4tn.jpg)

Rules (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmenrules01.pdf).  Please let me know if there are any tile in particular that needs clarification but isn't listed.

Is there going to be enough lakes to use all the junctions?

I don't think it matters.  Not every road is completed in a game of Carcassonne.  Not every river needs to be completed as well.  But I think there are more than enough sources and lakes to complete enough rivers if needs be.  And of course, there's always the abbey tile.  And yes, there will be expansions to Fishermen, two of which already have names - Whispering Woods and Kettle of Fish :) - where more end pieces could be added if needs be.

Edit: And of course, junctions also end the river sections, and since U-turns and ring-rivers are allowed, there shouldn't be any problems.

Edit2: I'll move this to final sometime next week if there are no furhter comments.

these are some great river tiles. I am printing these out and will add them to the game, as we play with several river expansions at the same time. These FAB tiles give us a bit more variation !!

Final version of rules (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmenrules10.pdf) and the zip file (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/junk/fishmen.zip) with all the tiles.

Tresure Hunt and Apples a Day should be next.

I absolutely love some of the tiles in this expansion. Nice.

I came of the idea of watermark symbol (angle) for this expansion:
(http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/3852/angletd.png)
Tile example:
(http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/7136/tileu.png) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/99/tileu.png/)
Tiles with watermark (please redownload, previous ones have wrong sizes):
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?56b5vurr3bh4tf9
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?857m42xfc6grmv4
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?4ewym3dqd6f2c5p
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1anuuohi83v9e6m

This came to my made because, I am planning to print this expansion, and I really like the idea of placing watermarks symbols on tiles to easy  distinguish them. I think the effect of my work looks neat so I decided to post it on this forum. Also it would be great if the author will incorporate my idea to his tiles and rules.

@Novelty:
I would like you to upload the new rules pdf with "(marked with <angle symbol>)" sentence added to "60 new river tiles", if you still have editable file of rules. CI would need to rewrite whole rules to do that without editable file. Thanks.

PS. Sorry for may english.

Here you go.  I didn't see sheet 2 with the icons.  Is that available?

http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/images/download/expansions/Fishermen/fishmenrules12.pdf

Sheet 1 isn't there either.

Thank you for uploading the rules, I really appreciate that :).

I have reuploaded all the sheets, because I changed placement of watermarks symbol to be more consistent with official expansions.

Download link (please redownload, previous ones have wrong sizes):
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?56b5vurr3bh4tf9
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?857m42xfc6grmv4
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?4ewym3dqd6f2c5p
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1anuuohi83v9e6m

I think you mean sheets.  ;)

O bother....
I just made these using the old version without the watermarks...   :-[

No problem I can just stick the new images over the old ones. ;D

I am also thinking of adding symbol for Fish Huts expansion, but the only one that come to my is:
(http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/638/hut.png)

What are yours thoughts about this?

How about a small fish icon inside the house ?

I was thinking about that, but I supose it will be looking to similiar to fish trade goods token from Kettle of Fish. Also fish huts are made for fishermens, not fishes, so I decided to put angle inside.

I finished work on Fish Huts, so the same request goes to Novelety about updating the rules. The Fish Huts was last expansions I am planning to print from The Fishermen series at this moment, but if someone will find it usefull, I may try to prepare watermark tiles for rest of it (expansions).

Tile sheet (please redownload, previous ones have wrong sizes):
http://www.mediafire.com/?9d09v84g8uth4cj (http://www.mediafire.com/?9d09v84g8uth4cj)

Your PDF files are very large. I tried to make them smaller but was not very successful. The combined set of PDFs are too large to upload (49 MB). Can you make smaller PDFs? Failing that, maybe you can send me your original files and I can try to PDF them smaller.

I uploaded my original files (png in 300dpi), so you can try to create smaller pdf. I tried to do that before, but I failed.
http://www.mediafire.com/?e3c23k9umjbknxu,1sxjbqcb1r3nsxx,aw5za13qm8ah1a7,lww1r4lwda5hfq5,8zbu04qsg73s1i5 (http://www.mediafire.com/?e3c23k9umjbknxu,1sxjbqcb1r3nsxx,aw5za13qm8ah1a7,lww1r4lwda5hfq5,8zbu04qsg73s1i5)

Hmm... not sure why your PDF were so big. I'll explain the process I use and maybe that will give some clues:
1. Create a new, empty document in Microsoft Word.
2. Insert the picture(s).
3. Resize the images so that the tiles are sized correctly for printing (tiles are 1.75 inches wide; 2 inches wide including the frame). If necessary, reduce the page margins. (I had to change the margins to 0.5 inches to get your images to fit correctly.)
4. Save the Word document as PDF (this is a native ability of Word 2010; a free plug-in is required for Word 2007; Word 2003 users will need to use a PDF printer)

I played around with compressing the images in Word before saving to PDF, but it didn't seem to make any difference to the size of the PDF file. I suspect that Word 2010 auto-compresses the images when saving to PDF; not sure if 2007 would do this also so I suggest compressing anyway to be safe.

I suspect some of you are converting your images to PDF directly without using Microsoft Word, since the "Producer" field is blank. Or maybe the PDF printer you are using leaves the "Producer" field blank and has poor compression. I don't know for sure.

I've also noticed that some people have very large rules PDF files (mostly Novelty, but sometimes others). Since I have the professional version of Adobe Acrobat, I am able to shrink these files using the "PDF Optimizer" under the Advanced menu. This does a variety of different things to reduce file size, but essentially it removes things to support features you aren't using and uses fancy compression on what's left. I think there are some free tools which can do some/most of these things also. One easy trick to save space, though not as effective, is to use a newer version of the PDF standard. I saw a lot of PDF files that were using version 1.2 of the PDF standard, which is roughly equivalent to Adobe Reader 5. The current version of Adobe Reader is 10; not everybody is using the latest version, but they probably have a newer version than Adobe Reader 5. Currently I'm making my stuff compatible with Adobe Reader 7, which I think is version 1.6 of the PDF standard.

Hopefully that wasn't too technical. If anybody finds it confusing, I'm happy to PDF your stuff for you if you can't get small file sizes on your own.

Anyways, I've updated the Fishermen expansion and the Fish Huts sub-expansion with the new tile artwork featuring watermarks:
http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=44 (http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=44)
http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=48 (http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=48)

I am working on linux and don't have MS Office, so I am unable to follow your sugestion, but thank for your help.

By the way, the archives from link you posted contains tiles without watermark.

Scott, these do not seem to have the fishhook watermark.

 ???

Not sure why the files are not overwriting. I have deleted the old ones and uploaded new ones:
http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=166 (http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=166)
http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=165 (http://carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=165)

Could someone (Novelty?) edit the rules for Fish Huts and add "marked with <angle in hut>" sentence to 12 new river tiles, please?

thanks for adding the watermark, but i printed the tiles at 100% and the tiles from fishermen.zip are bit to small - i noticed that after cuting out all 60 tiles  :-\
the tiles from fisherhuts.zip have the correct size!
is it possible to resize the tiles? thank you!

I made them the same size. ???

hmm, i printed both fishermen and fishhuts again, both with the same printer settings (100% / actual size). the tiles from the fish huts have a side length of exactly 4.5cm and the tiles from the fishermen have a side length of 4.3cm...

I found the same with the print out of the fishermen too. Fortunately I found out before cutting out the first tile and so just cut on the outside of the lines.

Ok, I will try to find time to redo it.

I redid the Fishermen tiles PDF, and they should hopefully be large enough now. I worked out what should be the right size, and then made them slightly larger than that even.