Carcassonne has been a part of our weekends recently.
My wife and I played a game on February 19 while waiting for my brother-in-law and his family to fly in for a visit. We played using the Base Game, the King and Robber Baron, the River II and some of the great custom start tiles created by MOS aka Cianopanza
http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/58039/alternative-starting-tiles-8-differents-ways-to-st from the BoardGameGeek site.
We also used the scoring tiles from Inns & Cathedrals. Speaking of which, some of the game artists on this site may want to create custom scoring tiles, perhaps in honour of the 10th Anniversary....
New for us, we began the game using the river fork as the starting tile, with all of the rest of the river tiles drawn separately. This creates a three-prong river and adds a random element, since all of the tiles may not be used if a spring or lake is drawn. We ended up having one river tile remaining, which we put to the side.
My wife won the extra points for both the King and the Robber Baron. We both scored 13 cities through farming, so there was no advantage there. From early in the game, I was waitng to get a curved road piece, so that I could attach one of my farms to one of hers. The tile never came to me, a rather unique and frustrating situation in a two-player game!
She ended up beating me rather soundly, by 181 to 157 points (for now, we are still scoring 4 points per city supplied by a farm).
I am including a picture of the final tile layout, as each game produces a work of art. I used the grey meeples and my wife the green. Her Rober Baron winning road is clearly visible. Can you see where I needed the curved road piece? The MOS tiles are also visible for being darker than the others. This colour difference does not bother me; I just pretend it is overhead clouds that are creating the shadow on the landscape!
CARC_Zoner