I have decided to work my way through the Carcassonne expansions that I own and try them out with the official solo mode for Carcassonne. You can read my review of the official solo variant of Carcassonne for an overview of the rules, and my thoughts on how it plays.
The expansion I have tried first is the ‘Shrines’ expansion (also known as the ‘Cultists’ expansion) from ‘Count, King and Robber’. This small 5 tile expansion includes 5 shrines, which behave like monasteries with one important distinction. If a shrine is placed next to a monastery (or vice versa), then if one of those features is completed before the other, it scores as normal, but the meeple on the opposing feature is removed from play without scoring any points.
In the multi-player game this can create some intense competition and makes building monasteries and shrines a risky strategy but one that can give high rewards (denying your opponent 7 or 8 points in a 2 player game is effectively the same as scoring them yourself).
How do these tiles impact the solo variant though? Well, here is an example of how the tiles affected a recent solo playthrough.
A shrine came out early in the game, so I jumped on it instead of the alternative road, and two tiles later a monastery came out.
A few turns later I was given the opportunity to complete the shrine with a city tile. Yellow was furthest behind on the scoring track so I did so. Had yellow not been in last position I could have potentially used it to help the red meeple’s monastery with the hope of later completing the shrine and monastery simultaneously (thus scoring if either yellow or black were in last place).
The strength of these tiles in the solo experience is that even though the red meeple scored nothing, it was freed up and returned to the supply. Running out of meeples is easily done, and triggers the end of the game, so the shrines are a great way of hedging your bets. Set up a competing shrine and monastery, complete whichever colour will score you points at any given time, and get both meeples back. Less risky than having two adjacent monasteries which will tie up meeples for longer.
Definitely a nice twist to add to the game. Now to try another expansion…
