Fischerhütte - The Carcassone: Fishing Hut tiles
A new tile from Carcassone: The Fishing Hut. (c) by Jörg Krühne.
Fischerhütte (is the title of a fan-produced Carcassonne extension. The author, Jörg Krühne, has designed this expansion for a large game of Carcassonne including tiles from the following extensions:
- Carcassone (basic game)
- Carcassone - Inns and Cathedrals (the first expansion from 2002)
- Carcassonne - Traders and Builders (the second expansion from 2003 - German title: Händler und Baumeister
- Carcassonne - King and Scout
- and 3 times Carcassonne: The River
- and (of course) Fischerhütte
The extension extends the rules and available tiles in three major areas.
Gameplay
All tiles from those three The River-extensions are used as regular tiles, i.e. the cards are not laid out at the beginning of the game (as indicated by the rulesbook for The River), but are shuffled into the other cards and drawn normally. The rivers work similar to the streets: it is now possible to put one Fisherman onto a river tile just played. The river tiels also score one point per tile when the river is closed.
In addition to the new fisherman concept, Jörg has also produced a number of tiles which include a new icon for raw materials. Since this expansion makes large use of the river concept the natural choice for the new trading icon was Fish (see picture). Fish works the exact same way as the other raw materials from Traders and Builders.
The Fishing Hut from Carcassone: The Fishing Hut. (c) by Jörg Krühne.
The third novelty to gameplay is The Fishing Hut as shown above. The hut plays exactly like a cloister, thus requiring nine surrounding tiles to score points. The player who places the ninth card around the hut gets the fish provided by the hut.
Design
The new tiles have a well-designed background. Unfortunately, the little fish icon is not the same quality. But if you don't like it, you can easily exchange them by using your favorite image editing software. The theme fits nicely to the ever popular River-extensions. The biggest problem will be to get three sets of that rare give-away extension.
Naturelich my opinion
Personally, I think the extension is nice for players who prefer long Carcassonne games. After all, you are using a number of extensions and a lot of tiles. This makes up for a long game. By changing the river tiles into regular street-like tiles the whole idea of the River expansion (= of getting a game started and finished more quickly) is practically reversed.
Since the Fisherhut works similar to cloisters the extension basically re-uses existing game mechanisms. This is a good thing for kids, because it is easy to explain and understood. The matured player may ask himself: why don't I use more cloister or street tiles instead? Well, it's probably because you like the popular river tiles so much, isn't it?
To put it in a nutshell: this unofficial expansion has a good layout and contributes to an extended, large Carcassonne river game. But it does not introduce many new game mechanisms. For me, it is therefore (unfortunately) not a must-have...
Download
The extension is available for download on the official Carcassone.de site, here.