The Tower Guardians

[Lardarse]

This idea is based on Novelty's Outpost variant, but provides rules to play it without creating additional tiles, as well as rules for allowing guards to be used to defend against towers.

Requires: CC, P&D, Tower. Other expansions are optional.
Additional components: none.

Most of the rules for CC, P&D, and Tower apply, except as follows

Tile placement is as the original rules.

When placing a tile with a tower foundation on it, the person whose turn it is, as a MTW action, may place a follower (small follower or big follower only) on the tower foundation as a guard, in addition to his other options. This does not allow him to use to capture another follower, as the tower has no levels.

When placing any tile, and using the MTW action to place a follower on top of a tower, this follower is placed as a guard. (To my knowledge, a follower placed in this way has not has his job named before.) Followers may not be placed directly on tower foundations (which could otherwise be thought of as 0-level towers) in this way, only on a tower with one or more levels.

When placing a tile with a magic gate, the gate may be used to place a follower on a tower foundation, as if the tile containing that foundation had just been placed.

When the dragon moves to a tile containing one of your followers (small, big, mayor, or wagon), you may remove one of your guards and return him to your supply. If you do, then the follower on the dragon's tile is not removed. If you have 2 or more followers on that tile, then you may remove one guard from the board for each follower that you wish to save. The owner of the affected followers decides which followers are saved in this way.

When one of your followers are captured by a tower, you may remove one of your guards from the board. If you do, then the guard that you removed is captured instead, and the figure that was originally elected to be removed remains on the board. (The intention of the wording here is that you may choose to remove one of your guards when capturing any of your own figures.)

These rules don't look that polished, but I think that they are a good start to making this work.

[Novelty]

Looks good.  I had thought of using the original tower tiles, but opted to make an expansion (i.e. with something new) instead of just a variant (with just new rules, which is an optional way to play, aka house rules).  Also "adjacent" in Carcassonne terminology includes diagonal as well as defined by the pictures in the rules for wagons in A&M.

[Lardarse]

Also "adjacent" in Carcassonne terminology includes diagonal as well as defined by the pictures in the rules for wagons in A&M.

I wasn't sure. There's a few places where it crops up but isn't clarified (including in the RGG rules for Shrines, which is the one that I was hoping would be in a recent version of CAR, and was eventually found in the current beta). Can I take this to mean that you can escape diagonally in The Outpost?

[Novelty]

Yes, diagonal escape is possible in the Outpost, and I presume for this as well.

[Lardarse]

Yes, diagonal escape is possible in the Outpost, and I presume for this as well.

I was intending tending to use the same escape rules, so yes. Clarification added.

[Lardarse]

0.3: Removed the rules for allowing followers to escape, and replaced them with much simpler rules (which are also more consistent with the rules for avoiding capture).

[Joff]

We have just finished a game using this variant.

There were no real problems as such and it plays ok.

I have a small issue with it; placing a guard onto the Tower foundation effectively locks a tower from being built.

Firstly, this changes the foundation distribution so that fewer towers can be built (assuming the guard remains there for entire game (of course that is unlikely)).

Secondly the blocking of a tower foundation poses another problem (which I think is more serious), this is especially so when the magic portal is used to occupy the foundation. This could be deemed as unfair, as not only is it possible to place a follower as a guard onto the foundation to protect a more valuable follower from being taken by another player by building a tower on that very foundation (locking off that tower from being built), but also when the piece that you are protecting is eaten by the dragon (or captured by a tower) you simply sacrifice the foundation placed guard to save the other. This is like a double whammy for opponents. Then (if your luck is good) you could, occupy the same foundation yet again, thus protecting the follower further. I think the problem here is that the tower foundation is supposed to be for something else and not used as a guard area. That is where using the Outpost tiles are better.

But, having said that, the variant works fine, as the above problems are unlikely to be encountered much during a normal game.

[Lardarse]

What would you suggest... removing the ability to place on foundations completely?

That could be interesting to try. My worry would be that it makes protection harder to do. Of course, then then pushes emphasis back to putting followers on tiles. Which could be very interesting if combined with Black Tower...

[Joff]

Like I said, the issue is only a small one. I don't think it is absolutely necessary to prevent the actual foundation being occupied as long as you can only occupy when you lay the foundation tile. It might be better to get rid of the magic portal foundation occupancy though.

So, IMO, I would advise that you leave it as it is, but remove the ability to occupy a foundation tile via magic portal.