The muggy day brought out an oldie but a goodie: Carcassonne. The four of us play with some house rules and a conglomeration of expansions. We don’t play with the bogus (in my opinion) river expansion but we do play with Inns and Cathedrals. This expansion gives you an additional double-sized meeple but we usually don’t play with the big guy as it adds a sneaky element that my kids tend not to appreciate. We also play with the farmer scoring rules that grant the farmer only three points per completed city and a player can only score points for a city once even it two farmers are in disconnected fields. Our final house rule is to play the game by laying a tile and then drawing a tile rather than drawing a tile and then playing. Having your next tile in your hand while others play speeds up the game by removing some of the analysis paralysis of deciding what to do with your surprise draw from the bag.
Carcassonne was one my first purchases years ago and I’ve given a copy of the game to several people as gifts. It still holds a special spot in my game psyche even if it is a little two-dimensional in strategy. I have the strategically deeper Carcassone the City but it hasn’t seen the table in over a year.