#Carcassonne rules series#

These are played each term like dominoes to build the world.įeatures: market islands (small islands drawn on a single tile), seas (blue areas that may cover multiple tiles, unbroken by other graphics), banana islands (which may cover multiple tiles), and walkways (wood 'roads' that terminate at rocks and islands and are decorated with shells). Tiles: cardboard squares with pictures of fish, boats, wooden walkways (with shells), islands (with bananas), and open sea. Changing the value of the provided resource tiles doesn't help-you need both enough to stockpile and to make 'change' on purchases. With five players, you'll quickly exhaust the supply. For three players there are barely enough resources and you must constantly trade with the bank to keep the resource supply liquid.

Make extra 5x resource tokens, such as coins or other counters.

Mark the larger (3x) resource tokens with a dot, since the size difference alone is too subtle for quick counting and the size is ambiguous when you're only holding a single token.

This saves the setup time of making the piles and allows you to sweep them off the table into the bag for faster cleanup.

Store the tiles in a bag instead of in face-down piles.

It already has a different back face, however that isn't helpful during cleanup when you only see the front faces. When you put away the other tiles at the end of the game, store the starting tile separately, with the resource tokens for faster setup next time.

Mark the front face of the starting tile to make it easier to find.

So, I recommend that you permanently modify your set before your first game:

There were also some poor design choices in the pieces. The game rules are confusing as printed, so I'll give a complete, streamlined description below. A group of regular adult board game players will probably not enjoy South Seas as much as Carcassonne, but casual players and children may prefer it. The tile designs force players to help each other more often, but because many possible tiles don't exist there are often frustrating gaps in the board (i.e., uncompletable features) and features are often small. South Seas has a shorter playing time when using our house rules, offers some variation in theme, reduces some mental arithmetic, and adds fun resource tokens. The advantages over Carcassonne are slight, and a lot is lost in exchange for them. I don't find these changes to be a net improvement. This is due to tile designs that force collaboration, eliminating end-of-game scoring, and fewer meeples (pawns) to work with. It is a little more accessible than the previous games.

#Carcassonne rules series#

South Seas is based on the core mechanic of the Carcassonne series but is a standalone game incompatible with previous games and expansions. I find that it takes 20-60 minutes depending on the number of players when using our house rules below for faster play and setup/cleanup, and works well for ages five and up. Carcassonne: South Seas by ZMan games is a tile-placement game for 2-5 players.