Carcassonne: Der Tunnel

2010-04-14 (rating 8.5):

An interesting expansion.

Tunnels allow much deeper control of roads value and scoring time. A tunnel can be used at least in two ways. First is to make rapidly a long road and gain Scout. Second is to capture opponents follower on a road (by connecting his road to your own tunnel without ever making the other connection.

So basically this is expansion is aimed towards increase of roads importance. And I think it is good as roads are somewhat worse than cities.

The bad side is that this expansion does not scale well. You cannot play with two copies of it since the marker chits will repeat. But only 4 tunnel tiles in a large pool of tiles (when playing with other expansions) is too little.

Also I don't like expansions attached to a magazine which is not distributed world wide.

The idea behind this expansion isn't bad, but in practice, there are far too few tunnel tiles to make it shine.

The expansion would also be better if roads were better. With our current favourite combination of expansions, roads are mostly just good for breaking up plains.

Doesn't add much, but doesn't hurt the game.