The Census
The Census Expansion was first suggested by Carcatronn on the
Carcassonne Central forum on Sep 3, 2014. The basic concept was to reward
the player who had the most meeples on the board during the game with 10
extra points at the end of the game. Similar to the rewards given for
Goods Tokens at the end of the game.
The original Census tiles were never fully developed, but here are the C1
tiles created by Leven and posted to the Carcassonne Central Forum on
Feb 20, 2016.
 
Then, starting on Nov 7, 2022, using my computer and image editing
Geek tools to convert Leven's C1 Tiles into C2 artwork. After quite a few
interactions and comments from kothmann, Challa007, wolnic, and Leven; here
are the C2 Census Tiles that I created.
The basic rules were that every time a Census tile was played, each player
counts the number of meeples they have on the board and then moves their
Census meeple that many points on the scoreboard.
The questions that were never answered, in my personal opinion, deal with
what happens when the Census scoring meeple crosses over 50 points. Since
there are only 6 Census tiles, that would limit the number of meeples
counted each turn to a maximum of 8. There are 7 standard meeples in play,
so maybe that is the limit of as a house rule you could include one and
only one additional meeple for Census counting.
My first suggestion for a house rule would be to count the number of standard
meeples on the board, plus the Phantom if it is on the board.
Since we
have decided as a group not to play with the Messages again, we could use the
Messenger meeple on the scoreboard as the Census meeple. Since we generally
do not include farms in our games,
 another option
might be to use the pig as the Census meeple.
As with the Goods Tokens, the player with the highest number of Census points
at the end of the game will score 10 points. If there is a tie for high score,
each tied player scores 10 points.
Carcatronn: September 03, 2014
When one of the census tiles are drawn, everyone counts their followers in play and moves a separate mini Meeple that many points on the scoreboard. At the end of the game, whomever had the most census points on the scoreboard is awarded 10 pts.
CKorfmann: September 04, 2014
This probably won't do, but just to get the brainstorming ball rolling, what about something like this? The person who has the highest "score" for the census gets the points scored by the person with the lowest? Or, perhaps they score the difference between the highest and lowest score.
Let's say the person who gets the most averages 5-6 meeples out each time. That's 30-36 points which is probably too big a bonus for the end game. The fewest points though would probably be somewhere around 12-20. That might not be too much, something like a decent farm.
quevy: April 12, 2015
I was thinking it would be interesting to get a different number of points for the followers. For example 1 point for followers in the city and monastery, 2 points for followers in fields and roads. It would change the score when the census is played at the beginning of the game there are definitely a few followers in the fields and in the end many, and followers on the roads are often not inserted at the end. I think this can bring a little more strategy.
Leven: January 20, 2020
As for the expansion itself, can we agree in the scoring mechanism? There has been some very interesting suggestions, my favourite is the one of CKorfmann: The person who has the highest "score" for the census gets the points scored by the person with the lowest? Though I'm afraid even this could be too high particularly if the census tiles tend to come late in the game.
Leven: January 28, 2022
I think it would be better to do the census a soon as the tile is drawn – to eliminate an advantage of the current player.
Challa007: January 28, 2022
I test-played 4 times.
. . . . . .
Challa007: January 31, 2022
After two more rounds of testplay I think I should modify my scoring suggestion:
. . . . . .
Carcatronn: June 16, 2022
Could take that a step further and only award census points for the most followers on roads, cities, farms, and cloisters so that only 4 pts are awarded each time the census tile is pulled. Helps promote earlier farm building. This would also prevent close score grouping and allow more score flexing. So this awards a total of 24 census pts maximum with only 6 census tiles. If someone were to somehow win all 24 census pts for the game, that still isn’t too crazy high, but it’s more likely these would be distributed in a fun way.
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