Hans Im Gluck Announces Expansions for Carcassonne and Bruges

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One of the many toy fairs in Germany is the Spielwarenmesse International Toy Fair Nürnberg, held in February. As you can imagine, there are many new games and expansions announced there--including new expansions for Stefan Feld's Bruges, and the latest Carcassonne expansion. Image from BGG user duchamp

While we'll be the first to admit that some of the Carcassonne expansions have jumped the shark *coughCatapultcough*, Carcassonne: Sheep and Hills actually looks pretty good. First, there are some hill tiles, and when you place one you immediately draw another tile and place it under the hill tile, creating a...hill. Now, if there's a tie, whoever is on a hill will break the tie. This is an easy and neat little addition that's simple enough to even add to the base game when playing with newbies.

In addition, there are sheep tiles that let you draw sheep chits from a bag if you place your shepherd (a new figure) there. But beware...there are also wolf chits, and they'll gobble up your sheep.

And finally, though it's not mentioned in the title, there are also a few new tiles with vineyards on them. If you place one of these vineyards next to a monastery, then when (and only when) that monastery scores, you score three extra points.

These all seem like sensible, easy to include, not-insane expansions. I might finally dive back into Carcassonne!

Image from BGG user duchamp

The other expansion is The City at the Zwin expansion for Stefan Feld's Bruges. According to the description on the Geek, this will include:

  • Components for a 5th player.
  • Additional character cards from a new guild.
  • New stock cards that each have a special power that modifies an existing action.
  • A new mechanic where, "whenever a 3 or 4 is rolled on a die at the start of a round, a ship of the same color is placed on the supplemental game board. As an extra action, a player can discard a worker of the appropriate color, reveal the matching ship, and take the action depicted, such as advancing on the influence track or reusing a one-time power on one of your character cards."
  • Some more statues of higher values to give people incentive to build canals.
  • A revised Engraver card to replace the one from the base game, as some people thought it was overpowered.

Each of these modules can be added to the game separately, or you can add all of them for utter Bruges madness... Apparently Z-Man will be printing an English version, but no word on when it will be available.

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