I have recently begun experimenting with the official solo variant of Carcassonne, trying out the many Carcassonne expansions that I own. Yesterday I tried the mini expansion ‘The Fruit Bearing Trees’.
The Fruit Bearing Trees is a nice little expansion to throw into multi player games of Carcassonne. It consists of 6 tiles featuring fruit trees. When one of these tiles is placed, a stack of 4 fruit tokens are placed on it, each with a number from 2 to 5 on its back. Whenever a meeple is placed on or adjacent to one of these tiles the player can either take the top token and score the number of points on its reverse, or alternatively sell sets of fruit tokens they have previously collected.
In a multi player game this creates clusters of meeples around the trees, resulting in lots of ‘incidental competition’ for the associated features even amongst players who might normally take a more ‘laissez faire’ approach to their games. The tiles and tokens are attractive and it is a nice way to add some of the feel of the ‘Traders and Builders’ expansion without transforming the entire game.
The only slight issue I have with the expansion is that I don’t think the tokens should score an additional point at the end of the game, as it makes selling sets of 2 tokens rarely worth it compared to taking a token, as only picking a ‘2’ numbered token will gain you less points overall.
So, how does the expansion work in the solo mode? Actually very well.
The fact that you have no choice but to always place a meeple when you can, creates an interesting dynamic. When you first draw a fruit tree token it is simply down to luck whether that colour meeple is able to score from picking or selling tokens (as the meeple can only score if it is last on the track).
But future tile placements become interesting. If you are placing a tile for a meeple of the last placed colour it is really tempting to place it beside a fruit tree to grab some points even if there might be other placements that would normally make more sense.
Conversely, when placing a tile for a meeple that is unable to score, you don’t want to waste a placement beside a fruit tree, even if that might otherwise be a good move. This was particularly the case as I decided to house rule this slightly by making it compulsory to pick or sell tokens when adjacent to a fruit tree, rather than optional.
I always find that the solo variant of Carcassonne is a game of continual risk assessment, where going for points has to be weighed up against the risk of over-committing your limited supply of meeples, and this expansion accentuates this. I found it to be really impactful in the solo game, influencing many of the decisions I made, and I will definitely be throwing it into the mix into some of my future games.
