Carcassonne Rules and Mixes

Several years ago my brother Jed and I started playing Carcassonne and decided to go all out and add as many expansions as we could to create a "total game". Along the way we encountered several vague explanations of rules... of course it was only us two and the rule book, so our comprehension of the rules could be faulty as well. So we made a list of questions we had in how game play was supposed to proceed. More recently, with different siblings in town Carcassonne came back out of the box and more questions were asked about set combinations. This time, out came the internet and several resources presented themselves.

Original List of Questions:

  • Can towers take wagons prisoner? - as of 30. December 2015, I suggest no because "wagons" are "like" followers, but the directions never say they are "followers". However, what if they can? following this logic the Mayor and the Builder then can not be taken prisoner either. However, It seems that the Mayor is a follower per the rules... though I could be wrong on this.
  • Can wagons be the follower on top of the tower?
  • Can towers take the large follower prisoner?
  • Tower Exchange: When pieces are automatically ransomed in an exchange are they like piece for like piece? or can a large follower be exchanged for a normal follower?
  • When playing with the Princess & Dragon and the Builder, and the fairy is activated on the second turn due to the builder but not on the first turn? - Must the maid remove the player's knight if adding to an existing city? what about cult tiles and what about orange edged tiles (Abbies) from the Abby & Mayor set?
  • Where in play does Catapult fit? ref. pg. 15 in the Big box Rule book.
  • When playing with Wagon and cloisters and the Wagon is on a cloister, when the road out of the cloister is "completed" by the same tile which completes the cloister, can the wagon move into the road?
  • When the dragon eats a wagon, can the wagon move to another tile?
  • When playing the Cult expansion, what happens when a single tile completes both challenges at the same time? And when this tile is played by a third player?
  • With Wagon and Dragon, can the wagon move onto a tile with the Dragon already on it?

Note that most of these rules have been cleared up with a good reading of the Fan Based rules (linked to below).

List of Awesome Resources about Carcassonne:

Finally, one of the most exciting things was tuck box templates for tiles.

The Living Room

When we bought our house in June of 2015, we knew there were several thing which needed to be done to make the place livable. One of those was to fix the leak around the chimney into the fireplace area in the living room. The leak was bad enough to cause discoloration, mold and mushrooms to grow. It required pulling down some 50 year old Douglas Fir paneling and finding a replacement. Here are some photos with dates to show how the project proceeded. 

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
   

Projector

This week Becky and I started looking for projector. Here are the requirements we found​

  • We want to projector with 3000 lumens
  • Have a 50,000 hour light bulb life-LED
  • At least a 3000:1 contrast ratio
  • Display dimensions of at least WUXGA
  • Wi-Fi enabled so that we can do presentations wirelessly (from OS X or iOS)

Some of the models we looked at are:

For the un informed (like I was), there was some good reading at the following websites: