Carcassonne Central

Before I move on to Dragon's Nest, here's a quick expansion.  I was originally gonna do shrines in abbey walls, but Whaleyland decided to claim that idea (well, that's his right to do so!) so it forced me to do some serious thinking.  Basically this expansion will just have abbey walls with a city inside it - aka a ghetto of some sort.  The tile is played in exactly the same way as the abbey with the exception that since it does not contain an abbey/cloister, a follower may not be deployed to the tile.  However since I'm in the mood to be nasty, the player that plays the ghetto may choose another player who must deploy a follower (normal or big only) into the ghetto.  That follower is stuck in the ghetto until the end of the game (and can only be removed by the dragon, or captured by the tower, etc.).  There will be other rules (such as the player chosen decides which follower to place in the ghetto - including the follower of another player that he/she has captured with the tower!)  The ghetto scores no points when completed or at the end of the game.

That sounds interesting... and yes, nasty!   :)

Here's the tile.

Edit: Replaced with the new tile.

The concept of this is an interesting one. I like the idea of forcing another player to play into the Ghetto. However, what I am not so keen on is the tile itself. Perhaps a different coloured border would be better than the orange, to distinguish completely between the Abbey and Ghetto.

The border consists of the roofs of the buildings.  Granted, those may also be made a different colour.  I'll see what I can do.  The reason I left it at orange is because I wanted more options (i.e. colours) left available for other ideas, and there are quite a few brewing out there I'm sure.

Edit: Added the new tile above.  I thought a "dirtier" colour of orange would work better for ghettos!

Now it looks like the graveyard! Joking- I like the brown... this quite a nice idea...

The graveyard brown is a darker brown, almost black.  This more orange milk chocolate :)

I realised that... sort of...

That is better. I like the brown :)

And here (http://www.dukenostalgia.com/carc/expansions/ghettorules01.pdf) are the draft rules.  Comments welcomed.

I don't see any problems with the rules. This is an excellent expansion, Nov. I really like it.

Looks good, but with abbeys and ghettos, it could become far too easy to fill in 'holes'...

Thanks!  I'm glad at least one person likes it.  I went back and designed this around the german game elements
1. It must be simple - well, this is "almost" the abbey that it would be simple to anyone who's used to playing the abbey.
2. It must add something new - Well, trapping another person's followers has been done before with The Prison, Stocks, etc. but this allows another person to trap a 3rd party's followers, which was a new twist.
3. It must not reward the leader, but must instead help the underdog - well, guess who would most likely be the target of the ghetto - yes, the leader, and that may level the playing field enough for the underdog to catch up with the leader.

Not when there's more holes than abbeys!  This becomes a lot more apparently when playing with just Forests and Fishermen as seen in the example below.

(http://www.dukenostalgia.com/carc/images/midgame.jpg)

There were only 3 players in the game and many a time each one of us wished we had more abbeys!

Edit: I guess I'll move it to public downloads (http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=49&Itemid=62).

Ditto...  My wife said she really likes it too, and she's an artist.

It looks great. Sorry I wasn't here to help make this quick expansion. I've been traveling for the past week and had no internet, and forgot to tell anyone on CarcCentral. My bad. I'm back in the USA permanently now, though, so I've lost my access to cheap blank Carc tiles.

Anywho, my reply is mostly to:


I don't know about all of you, but I rarely actually play with the A&M expansion. It's nothing personal really, since it includes nice tiles that don't have any specific features on them, but I just don't, perhaps because I feel that the barn is too powerful. Anyway, my point is that it only becomes 'far too easy to fill in "holes"' if you are playing with A&M, otherwise, it is a perfect expansion with very little negative visual effect, especially since the brown probably blends much nicer than the bright orange (bad choice, HiG, bad choice!).

Great expansion, Novelty, I'll have it printed out as soon as I have to time to start printing things out again. I'll also get to work on those Pagan Temples-shrine-abbey thingies. Again, anyone have a good quality scan of an Abbey tile on cardback? I never took scans when I punched mine and have since thrown away the cardbacks. Maybe BGG has one...

Maybe if you played with both abbeys and ghettos, but you didn't want it to become too easy to fill holes, you could throw all the abbey and ghetto pieces into a bag, and at the beginning of the game, each person draws one.  They would get an abbey or a ghetto, but not both, and could plan accordingly.

That's a nice variant as well.  I guess the amount of abbey/ghettos that each person should use is dependent on the number of expansions being played.  Ghetto was designed to be played together with either Forests or Fishermen.

Got a chance to really look at this today.  Here's a compliment on something out of the ordinary.  As much as I agree with the positive comments about the expansion itself, I really like the small changes you've made in the formatting of the rules document.  Not sure what the proper term would be, but the more "pixelated" blue background is really nice and I like your font choices.  I think you've used some of them before, but the document format as a whole struck me as new and really nice.  Kudos...