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Review of Carcassonne Expansion 8: Bridges, Castles & Bazaars
Blurb from the publisher: 'New tiles give new chances!
Twelve new land tiles expand the world of Carcassonne even further. Placing the new bazaar tile allows you to host an auction, giving you the chance to spend your earned points to buy advantageous tiles. The player willing to bid the highest will get first choice of tiles to then place and score.
Small cities will score you a few points, but the new castle tile can transform the city and give you a chance to score even more points. As the area around the castle develops, the next feature to be finished and score will give you points as well because of the castle tile. Will you build the castle and take the gamble to score more?
Get around blocked paths!
Dead ends aren't a problem anymore! Travel the long road, crossing brides into new lands. With twelve wooden bridge tokens, players can easily continue a blocked road with a bridge piece. Follow the new connected roadway to score.'
What you get: Your USD 17,99 or equivalent will buy you Carcassonne Expansion 8: Bridges, Castles & Bazaars, an expansion for the Carcassonne game line, a game of tile building and pattern placement that can accommodate from 2 to 6 players. The base game has won a number of accolades, has been as commercially successful as a non-collectible game can ever be, and is rightfully considered a modern classic. Game time can be as short as 45 minutes if you are only using the base game along with this expansion. It can however expand to multiple times that, if you decide on a game that incorporates more than one expansion.
In addition to the small, 6-page English rulebook which can also be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: 12 Land tiles, 12 Castle tokens, and 12 Wooden Bridges.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have been playing Carcassonne since it came out, back in the day when the original box was much smaller and contained less than the current basic box. This is not your usual playtest.
Gameplay: The expansion is modular and contains three distinct elements: the bridges, the castles, and the bazaars. These can be used in any combination, be it autonomously, together, or with the modules of other expansions.
Depending on the number of players, each player starts with either two or three bridges at his disposal. When a player places a tile, he can now place a bridge either on it or on a tile adjacent to it. The bridge acts as a road, and boldly goes where no road has gone before: above tiles without roads on them (or at least, not in that orientation). Meeples can be placed on a bridge. Unlike roads, bridges do not separate cities or fields.
Depending on the number of players, each player starts with either two or three castles at his disposal. Castles can be placed on a small city that has just been formed (i.e. a city composed of only two tiles). A meeple can be placed on a castle. The castle meeple does not score points the way the city meeple does. Instead, it scores points when the first neighboring feature within neighboring tiles is completed. The neighboring feature can be anything: a monastery, a city, a road, etc. If you own both the castle and the feature that just got scored, you double that feature's points. If you own just the castle, you gain the points of the feature that just got completed. At that point, the castle meeple is returned to its owner's hand as expected, but the castle remains on the board, providing an extra bonus in field scoring.
The Bazaar tiles are like any other tile with roads, cities, farms etc around them, yet they also include a bustling bazaar, striped tents included. The tiles are placed and score as usual; the bazaar has nothing to do with placement on the board, meeple placement or scoring. What it does is that, after all that has been done, the player that just played draws as many cards as there are players. The player on his left chooses a card and players bid points on it. When, after a standard bidding procedure where players either bid higher or pass, a final bid is settled upon, two thing can happen. The player who chose the tile may either buy the tile from the highest bidder for the bid's value and pay him in points, or sell him that tile for that same value, a case in which the highest bidder will pay him in points. The score track is adjusted accordingly between those two players. In fact, with this expansion it is now possible for players to have negative victory points. Bidding continues with the next player choosing a tile and bidding on it, and so on and so forth. A player that has already purchased a tile no longer participates in bids. Once the process is over, each player plays a standard round with the tiles they just purchased, i.e. place on the board, place meeple, and score. Buying a tile with another bazaar on it does not trigger another round of tile purchases.
The rulebook ends with a page of explanations on how to use certain elements of the present expansion with modules from other expansions.
The strong points: Carcassonne has many aces up its sleeve, and the first module of this expansion proves it with gusto. I thought that bridges would be a feature that allows you to fill holes in otherwise long roads near the end game when the variety of tiles has decreased. I was wrong. Bridges are a nice, aggressive tool that allow for the creation of enormous fields. You have a limited number of them at your disposal, so play them wisely. If you manage to do so and assimilate field after field in your industrial-sized farm, you will see end-game point returns that were previously unheard of, and which can totally alter the look of the score board. Fields just got an enormous boost in desirability, and the game has become substantially more strategic.
The Castle can be played either as a multiplier or as a nullifier. You effectively sacrifice four points (the small city it covers), in the hope that you will make it big when the first feature that borders it gets build. As a multiplier, this has great chances of happening, since you will actively want to pursue your other feature. As a nullifier (building it so that you gain the exact same points as another player building something like a monstrous city) it can frustrate the plans of your competitor. Even though he will get the points of the feature he works for, you will also get them yourself. Don't expect people to stop what they are building; it will only seldom happen. They need to reuse the meeples after all. Well-placed castles are the difference between victory and defeat; do not overlook them.
Bazaars add biding to the game, and cleverly so. Seeing how there aren't any tangible resources on the game, tiles are paid in victory points. In other words, the tile might suit you, but it ultimately eats away from your point return from the feature that you want to use it for. Sometimes a tile might be worth it, other times it might not. In a further twist, you might be the highest bidder, but it is ultimately the player who chose the tile who decides whether he gets it or whether you get it. If you thought you could artificially inflate a tile's value in order to eat away at a competitor's expected profit, think again: he might force you to take the tile and earn points while doing absolutely nothing! There are also many more issues to consider, like the order in which tiles are chosen for auction, or who chooses each tile; is it somebody who needs it, or not? The bidding game is a cerebral affair for connoisseurs, and demands a much higher investment in the game. If you have hardened Carcassonne veterans around you, it is a very enjoyable addition.
Like every other expansion out there, this expansion is modular and increases replayability in spades. The number of combinations is astronomical, when one starts to add up all the modules and expansions.
The production values of the whole line are very high. The artwork is identical to the one we already know and love. Every expansion has its own dedicated pictograph, allowing you to insert and extract expansions as you see fit. No changes here.
If you didn't like this expansion, or if you liked it so much that you wish to see even more of them, you are in luck. The line has eight expansions not included in the Carcassonne Big Box 2017. We are going through all of them together as we speak.
The weak points: If you don't pay attention bridges can lead you into overstating the importance of fields and make your game extremely static. Meeples in fields are not returned until the end of of the game. You might end up watching your opponents tactically reusing their meeples and gain points while you lie around waiting for the final bonanza to come. Do not be complacent. Be on the lookout for field opportunities yet at the same time do not overplay this feature. If you place your field meeples and subsequent bridges cleverly, you will end up with a much higher yield using the same number of field meeples as in the base game.
I haven't seen another feature which can be as frustrating as the castle, both metaphorically and literally. It can increase an advantage by doubling it, or nullify a grandiose project. There are countermeasures, of course. The castle only scores for the first feature around it that gets concluded. If your opponent just placed a castle, ensure that the megastructure you are working on is not the one that scores first. In that sense, the castle may potentially deviate resources from major to minor projects, altering the order in which they progress. Than can and should be used as a tactic.
Bazaars are kind of pointless for two-player games, and work with moderate success in games with a low headcount. You really need a full table (or a high headcount) for bidding to shine. Like bridges, they turn the base game into a substantially more competitive experience, while at the same time they add a sub-mechanic that is not used anywhere else. In that sense, they put a damper on the game's flow. Going through the bidding process is not as fast as playing a tile. I do not recommend using it when you are pressed for time, or when you teach the game to newbies. If you think that vanilla Carcassonne is complex and competitive enough as it is, this module might make it feel harder, aggressive even, in addition to making it longer.
I appreciated the index at the end of the Big Box, breaking down the tiles' sides so that a player can deconstruct and learn the game more easily. There is no such index here. Why not?
Compare the price of the Big Box to the price of each expansion separately, and it becomes obvious that every expansion is rather expensive for what it offers.
Conclusion: Carcassonne Expansion 8: Bridges, Castles & Bazaars adds interesting features in a game line that is inundated with expansions. I enjoyed all of them; I am in fact very likely to use all three modules in my longer games with high player counts. There is no denying however that Bazaars make for an even longer game, while Castles can cause some frustration to competitive and social games alike. Depending on how much you play Carcassonne, this expansion can easily return the investment.
For more info on Carcassonne Expansion 8: Bridges, Castles & Bazaars and Z-Man Games visit their website at http://www.zmangames.com.
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