The idea of the CC expansion got me thinking regarding variants/expansions that could well work with a CC 12-tile 'official' release, which is why I stuck with small mini-expansions that I am currently developing. I have also been having brief chats with Novelty regarding this (via PM). We think this subject would be more useful out in the open, amongst the Admins and Authors of CC.
Novelty's initial assessment of a CC expansion was to have just tiles and no 'new' expansion tiles, similar to the ones I am currently working on. I feel that if we ever were able to market an expansion (which would be a long shot, let's face it), missing out on the chance to have published something completely different, that requires a ruleset (even if you could point people to it via CC) would be a wasted opportunity. After all, you would probably get only one chance and I would love to have an 'official' Jousting Tournament ring (i'll be honest!) instead of my home-made version!
I made a statement to Novelty that that would be pointless to produce an expansion that added nothing 'new' in the way of rules, seeing as we could get most configurations of tiles via official expansions.
I do not think that GQ11 was pointless, far from it... we needed a tile with a road leading from the spring, and some of the tiles were indeed different configurations. That expansion at least added something useful, but in the process swallowed up more ideas for different tiles.
My point was, how many more different configurations that would be useful can there be left? It's all very well making nice looking tiles that don't add anything different regarding configuration and rules, but that would be indeed pointless. I see Noveltys idea about a four way roundabout would be useful, and perhaps 3 way roads that are blocked on one side only might be ok (Cleric and Serf, Families), and a lake that has a road leading from it... but what then? Edit: I can see now that there might be quite a few that exist.
I'm just putting the 'feelers' out, so we can all have a think about this and perhaps come up with new configurations that haven't been done before, have a real need to be included, but don't add anything in the way of rules. Although for every expansion released there will always be some point or another that will require arbitration. For instance, adding roads which tunnel underground (one which we already have officially) would lead to having to make an official statement about it eventually (think of the GQ11 pig herd... Jay was forced to make an decision (the wrong one, I might add
) even though most presumed it was a pig herd, and still do).
One idea would be, to add the pretty tiles (i.e. one which had a Jousting Ring included on it, or a picture of stocks!
) without giving
any extra rules for it! You could use it as a regular tile or when one gets to make the inevitable arbitration statement, point back to the rules for using!
Thoughts?
