The Farmers

General info and comments

Originally released by Hans im Glück in 2014.

Farmers are considered a part of the base game for most Carcassonne players. They are also used in every official tournament as they are not considered an expansion. In the new edition of Carcassonne farmers were separated as a supplement to ease approach to the game for new players. WikiCarpedia follows this streamlined approach. For the sake of other expansions and the rest of the WikiCarpedia, farmers are considered a part of the base game.

What would life be without agriculture? We try to answer part of this question by introducing the hard-working farmers who spend long hours in the fields of Carcassonne. As we did for the roads, cities, and monasteries, the farmers will be presented using the actions of a game turn.

Contents

• None. Only contents of base game are used.

Rules

1. Placing a tile

You draw the tile shown, and must place it in such a way that the edges of the tile match the edges of the tiles already in play. Fields always refer to the green spaces found in the landscape of Carcassonne.

Example: On the tile shown above, there are three field segments.

2. Placing a meeple as a farmer

A farmer is a meeple that you place “laying down” in a field segment. Unlike highwaymen, knights, and monks that are all placed standing up, farmers are laid down on a tile because they are only scored at the end of the game. Consequently, they are not returned to your supply after scoring. Laying farmers down ensures that you remember to leave them on the board. As always, you can only place your farmer if there are no other farmers in the field. The fields of Carcassonne are divided by roads and cities. Pictured below are three separate fields.

Example: The field in which you are placing a farmer goes from the tile you just placed to the city with your knight. The yellow farmer has not impact since he occupies another field.

  Question: On monastery tiles, are we allowed to deploy a follower on the surrounding field segment?

Answer:

Yes! The same rules are valid for a field surrounding a monastery as for any other field. You can also deploy a farmer next to a monastery. In this case the monastery is left unoccupied.

3. Scoring fields

As mentioned previously, farmers are not scored during the game and, consequently, they do not return to your supply. So place your farmers wisely. Now, let’s assume the game is over and that we are conducting the final scoring. Unlike other features, it is not the field tiles that are counted, but the number of completed cities that border a field. Each completed city that touches a field adds 3 points to the value of that field. All fields touched by a city will see their value increased by 3 points.

Example: Three completed cities touch the large field occupied by a red farmer and a blue farmer. Both players will score a total of 9 points for the three completed cities: A, B, and C. Neither of them scores any points for city D since that city is incomplete.
Both the yellow and black players have farmers in the same field, but Yellow has control, so the yellow player will be the only one scoring the field's 12 points for completed cities 1 - 4.
The black player in the small field scores 3 points per completed city ( A and B ), for a total of 6 points.

  Question: It is unclear whether incomplete farms earn points during the final scoring.

Answer:

It is almost impossible to close off or complete most of the farms. The most important thing when scoring the farms are the cities, which do indeed have to be complete. So: completed cities count on incomplete farms as well.

  Question: At the end of the game, do we score farms which are completely closed off by roads, but which don't have any adjacent cities? If so, how?

Answer:

Strictly speaking, they should be scored exactly like every other farm, with 3 points for every completed city. In this case, that makes a total of zero points. And the farmer is nevertheless unable to leave the farm.

Summary

A brief summary the most important details about farmers:

• Farmers are placed “laying down” on the board.
• Farmers are only scored during the final scoring, not during the game.
• Each completed city adjacent to a field you occupy gives you 3 points.
• Each completed city can be worth points for any number of different fields.
• Similar to roads and cities, if there is more than one farmer in the same field, only the player with the most farmers in that field scores its points. In the case of a tie, each tied player scores full points.

Footnotes

For Icons explanation and licensing please visit Icons page.