A small expansion for Carcassonne is the
King and Scout expansion, which includes some tiles for Carcassonne and some tiles for
Hunters and Gatherers, a game like Carcassonne but using different tile graphics and slightly different scoring.
Part of the King and Scout expansion are the two tiles seen here, The King and The Robber Baron. These add a bit of extra strategy to the game.
- The King: The first person to complete a city gets the King tile. During the game, anyone who completes a city that is made using more tiles than the current largest city gets to be the king. At the end of the game, the person holding The King tile gets 1 point for each completed city.
- The Robber Baron: This works the same as The King, but for roads instead of cities. At the end, the player holding the Robber Baron is the player who completed the longest road, and gets 1 point for each completed road.
Some people would argue that these tiles don't add anything to the game and are just "one more thing to remember". However, we find that this is not the case. There is a definite strategy involved in trying to build the largest city possible while at the same time being careful that you don't build the city in such a way that it is impossible to close. As the game gets closer to the end, the person with the least amount of points generally starts fighting hard to be The King or The Robber Baron to try and swing the play their way.
Depending on the kind of people you play with, you might want to add some variations to your gameplay such as saying that cities composed of only 2 tiles don't score for the king. This stops some real cutthroat players from getting the King and then wasting all of the city tiles building as many tiny cities as possible.
The coins in the picture below aren't for scale purposes. In order to keep track of the largest city and road, we use coins on the scoring track to mark the sizes. The coins on the tiles here are for keeping straight which coin is for which tile. We started out using extra unused meeples for this purpose, but there were too many accidents by the official scorekeeper (me) moving the wrong meeples at scoring time, so we stopped doing that.
