Having the out-of-print edition of Carcassonne makes wasting money on unnecessary expansions both harder and easier. Fortunately, some expansions are more about the concepts than the components, so there are plenty of opportunities to enhance your game on the cheap with some pick 'n' mix accessories and intellectual property theft.
White & Black Samurai (Mage & Witch)
- 2 x samurai meeples from Eiyo
- 6 x magic portal tiles (from The Princess & The Dragon)
Unused black and white figures from a solo game's unnecessary two-player mode are put to better use with conventional racist colour associations to represent the characters from this elusive mini expansion. For want of bespoke tiles, they're triggered each time a magic portal tile's drawn, because those crop up about frequently enough and it's magic, innit.
Trading Posts (Fan Expansion)
- 4 x coloured tokens from Cities of Splendor
A neat fan expansion that offers an end-game incentive to tangle cities together with roads, this would have made a great addition to Traders & Builders if they'd thought of it. The trading posts can be represented by any distinctive tokens in as many player colours as you can do.
The Obelisk (Fan Expansion)
- 4 x plastic towers from Cities of Splendor
A sort of barny twist on cloisters, you can plonk a token on a corner intersection and try to score a grid of 16. Best placed near a cloister or other features you're actively trying to complete anyway, then you can forget about it for the rest of the game and earn some passive points.
Apprentices (Fan Expansion)
- 6 x mini meeples
No longer in use
The Count of Carcassonne
- Carcassonne Start Tableau
- Purple mega meeple
Before getting the original tile jigsaw in the Count, King & Robber set, I made do with the one-piece starter tile and a no-frills purple guy, who was admittedly a little less intimidating without the cloak. The slab was donated to a school maps project and the purple guy became an equally unimpressive DIY Mage.
King & Robber Baron
- Orange messenger meeple
- Orange robber meeple
- Pen and paper
These stand-ins served us well before their proper tile equivalents came along, but since the first edition didn't think to include marker tokens, I've retained the figures to track the largest features on the board. We also have real messengers now, just to make it look even less like a king, but the robber still works.
The Apprentice (The Phantom)
- 6 x mini meeples
