Favourite House Rules? (for the CAR)

[mjharper]

I'd like to know what everyone's favourite house rules are so that a section can be added to the CAR. Here's a couple of suggestions:

- Take your next tile at the end of your turn, to give you time to think about placement and avoid analysis paralysis.

- Place the river first, then fit the city of Carcassonne first to it so that the most tiles are touched.

- Ban all river U-turns to prevent problems with subsequent placement.

- Rather than discarding the second fork (from The River II and Count, King and Consorts), mix it in with the other river tiles and place it normally when it is drawn.

Any other suggestions?

[Joff]

The players decide who starts the game by any method they choose (currently this is decided by rolling three meeples. The person who has one upstanding first, decides who plays first)

We play the fork of the river first, and lay the spring last. The lakes being mixed in with the other river tiles.

Once the River is complete, we are permitted to move it to the 'centre' of the playing area.

With King and Robber Baron, each holder of these cards at the end of the game gets a straight 10 points for each card (matching the Trade points system of scoring, and avoiding the problem of counting finished roads).

We do not score for the pig herds... herds... can I use the plural?

[dwhitworth]

In addition to some of those mentioned:

 - We play both rivers backwards starting with the city/lake. This is more realistic becasue we then get two springs producing rivers that join and flow "down" to a lake. We discard two lakes - the plain one from Rivers I and the volcano. (If playing P&D we just let the dragon appear at the first volcano land tile.) To set up we place the lake tile, put one spring tile aside as a final ending tile, and then split the balance of the river tiles into two stacks. The junction tile is shuffled into the stack 1 and the other spring into stack 2. Then the stack 1 is placed on stack 2 - so that the junction will be pulled sometime before the spring. If playing with the Count, we place the city/lake so that it completes one of the small cities around Carcassonne.

 - We have drawn "fences" on the spring tiles from the centre to the NE corner (river flowing South). This fence divides the farm on the spring tile.

 - We play with all tiles regardless of the expansions in use because we like long games.

 - We play with a bag for the tiles and therefore allow the original starting tile to be put in the bag as well as replacing unplayable tiles into the bag. we also throw dragon tiles back into the bag and redraw right away if there is no dragon in play yet.

 - We allow players to claim a fairy point until handing the bag to the next player, but then tough if you forgot!

Edit; forgot one - we only allow wagons to be used in cloisters (and I suppose shrines) if the tile also contains a road. This means that the wagon can't be used in an abbey.

 - We play 100% HiG rules and are taking a course in defenestration techniques in order to deal with RGG based disagreements . . 

[Scott]

Some different ways of playing the river have already been mentioned; here is what I think is a complete list of all the techniques I've heard of: http://www.carcassonnecentral.com/forum/index.php?topic=195.0

[Tobias]

Trees (bushes) on roads do not end the road, only houses do (when the road forks). We always play with this, and it makes the road building a lot more dynamic.

[dwhitworth]

Trees (bushes) on roads do not end the road, only houses do (when the road forks). We always play with this, and it makes the road building a lot more dynamic.

Interesting.
When (and if) you play the tower, there are three tiles where tower foundations sit on roads. Do you have these roads end at the tower or not?

[Tobias]

Interesting.
When (and if) you play the tower, there are three tiles where tower foundations sit on roads. Do you have these roads end at the tower or not?

If the road ends in the tower, yeah (I don't remember how they look just now). The rule was simply a missunderstanding from the beginning, we didn't consider bushes enough of a blockade to end a road, it never really came up. It wasn't until I came here that I understood that everything was meant to end roads. But we didn't change it since, well, our rule is better

[Diminuendo]

One of my favourite house rules is allowing players to keep drawing additional tiles as long as they extend their city/road where their builders is deployed.

[dustyu]

We play the King and Baron differently.  The player that completes the first road, gets the Baron and keeps it until another player completes a longer road.  While the Baron is in your possession, you get 1 pt for every completed road.  Same goes for the King and cities.  We like using this method, as the scoring is done throughout the game, instead of having to count the roads and cities at the end.  Some games one player has the King or Baron the entire game, other games they change hands many times.

[Deatheux]

my house rule is if someone steals a city/road to other player he MUST pay a beer to the player, if the player does NOT drinks alchool, he MUST gave it to me. if the dumbhead steals MY city/road, he must pay to my 3 beers.

p.s. i am the game owner!

Seriously, the only house rule that we sometimes is "buying tiles". i.e. when a tiles is the ONLY tile(in the moment) to close a structure, we can offer points, trades counter, abbey, etc... pretty cool sometimes!

we also sometimes, play in team, this is a hardcore way to pump up cities to over 120pts!!!

hope to not duplicate!!

[kcukrowski]

Our favorite house rule is that we only play moves "against" each other for which a piece actually exists. We don't, however, keep track of whether or not those tiles are still in play.

Tip: the other thing we do is we lay the meeples down on the farms (as opposed to standing upright); that way, in case the board gets jolted, as sometimes happens, we can tell whether or not a meeple was a farmer or on a road or city.

[Novelty]

Tip: the other thing we do is we lay the meeples down on the farms (as opposed to standing upright); that way, in case the board gets jolted, as sometimes happens, we can tell whether or not a meeple was a farmer or on a road or city.

Yup, that's what the rules say.  It makes for quick identification who is a farmer and who is not.

[Gantry]

Our favorite house rule is that we . . .

kc wanted his post to be attached to the Fav CAR house rules thread, so I merged them fyi.

[viberunner]

As your 'touch wood' move, The Wagon can move to the next complete, or uncontested incomplete, feature. One feature (road feature per turn). This lets it roll across the board to uncontested features.

The Tower cannot cature over empty tiles.

The stand-alone pig herd tile counts as an extra pig herd.

We avoid the "Fairy Track", it's too annoying to keep track of. Instead he has the Dragon Protection, and 5 points for a protected Meeple completing a feature.

King and Robber Baron we have as finished roads and cities. At game end we use a LOT of dice, place them on the board as we look for finished features, and count as we collect them up.

The Mayor cannot be captured by the Tower (toughens him up nicely).

The Wagon cannot be eaten by the Dragon or captured by the Tower (the Meeple hides in the hay as it flys over).

We permit the Wagon use in non-roaded features. It can move from the Abbey to a touching city or road (one move, one turn) but it cannot do so from a Cloister that touches only farm (it's not a 4x4 jeep!).

We stand Meeples up on Cities and Roads, lay them on the side farming (shoulder ploughing a field) or flat down (praying).

BEAUTY BONUS, our biggest change. If you place a tile that touches something on all 4 adjacent sides, you get another turn. This helps motivate people to finish the board even if you don't get advantage from the placement. (Does not apply to Abbey tile).

[Joff]

We stand Meeples up on Cities and Roads, lay them on the side farming (shoulder ploughing a field) or flat down (praying).

Following on from that, we lay the Mayor flat (same as farmers). This way we can tell at a glance which cities contain Mayors as we found that we had to double-take when using the big meeple and Mayor.