The 5000 point Carcassonne Game (we reigned it in a bit)

Every year, me and a few friends play Carcassonne. We play a single game, and we use as much tiles as possible. That means every single readily available expansion. The last two years we didn't manage to actually finish, so this year we stopped including double or triple base games. Still, we started with 500+ tiles and playing took us some 16 hours over two days to finish, not counting final tallying and cleanup (an hour extra each).

House rules / amendments:

• we used two dragons, and every dragon movement happened with both of them
• from move 1 we allowed drawing your next tile after your turn finishes, to speed up thinking time. I recommend everyone do this, it saves so much time.
• we house ruled Leipzig to allow all 6 players to enter. This was a good idea and Leipzig was pretty crucial
• we didn't use plagues, catapult and russian promo cards because our collector friend doesn't have them. We didn't use gifts either, because our collector friend hates them. Apart from that, we used everything ever made as an expansion.

The game was pretty fun. Obviously, it's not balanced. Leipzig, Wonders and Robber King/ King decide hundreds of points. We had 151 roads on the map, obviously that sways the count.

The City of Carcassonne was surprisingly not very impactful. Maybe we grasped it too late. It's really hard to have all options of what to do in your head at all times.

There were some controversial expansions:

Leipzig: very very impactful, not everyone liked that.

Bazaars: beloved by most, hated by one in our group. They take forever, obviously, but give control and take a bit of skill to navigate.

Halflings: I love halflings. One of the coolest things the ever did. Some in our group feel they discourage building big, since it's kinda easy to ruin large structures with a halfling.

Mrs Mayor: I'm not sure how I feel about her. I think she's fine and balanced enoughed, others thought she was overpowered and made stealing cities too easy.

Bathhouses were universally hated though. They're incredibly annoying to keep track of and they really handicap quick and intuitive gameplay.

In general I feel like many of the more recent expansions put emphasis on things that are visually small. Things like Geese, Stables, Travellers on the road etc are all difficult to make out from across the table, let alone the room (in our case). One of the big advantages the basegame has imho is that it's very legible, and I feel many more recent expansions kinda kill that.

As for points:

Red: 1048

Blue: 1035

Green: 898

Black: 885

Pink: 862

Yellow (me): 614

As is customary, I got last place. I got shafted by dragons multiple times, but such is this game.

If you have any questions, thoughts, or stuff about specific expansions and how we used them, feel free to ask! I love chatting about this game and we ran into pretty much every conceivable scenario over the years.

Looking forward to next year!