Dungeons of Carcassonne: What It Might Look Like

I was reviewing my site stats today and saw an inbound link to my Dungeons of Carcassonne post from last year. I’d almost forgotten about it (and the followup post)

This happy reminder caused me to consider reposting the link to Google+, and while I looked for an image of a Carcassonne tile to add to that post I stumbled on an article by Peter Norvig about building a ‘nice layout of cities‘, that led to the map below.

Peter Norvig's Carcassonne 'Urban Challenge' result
Peter Norvig’s Carcassonne ‘Urban Challenge’ result

I think it unlikely a Carcassonne dungeon map would be quite this tidy in practice, unless an effort is made to make it so.

That might be worth doing, actually, even if it does require more planning up front and cooperation. I’ll have to think about it.

Anyway, it looks like this could be workable. I think I might make a few changes to my original plan, though.

  • Where a road leads directly into a city, you have an open doorway.
  • Where a road passes adjacent to a city wall (as with the top second from the left in the top row — the road and wall must be on the same tile, I think), there is a door.
  • Where walls of adjacent cities touch, you have a door or a doorway (or a secret door)… some kind of connector.
  • Cities with fields between them (such as the cheesy-twos in the second row) are not connected (or may be connected with a secret passage?)
  • I have no idea what to do with the cloisters.

This planned layout looks like a pretty feasible dungeon, actually. All cities can be reached, there are decisions to make in navigating (branching paths) with few linear connections. Only in a couple of places must you pass through one city to get to another, and there are places you can shortcut the hallway by cutting through a room, and conversely avoid a room by sticking to the hallway.

I’ll have to a graph of this, I think, but it looks like this actually might be a decent dungeon map. I find this very cool.

However, as good as this looks as a dungeon map, I think the cooperative construction and attempt at a ‘nice’ layout might detract from it as a gaming structure. I think I’d prefer to keep the random draws and construction (with rewards for completing cities). Perhaps I would break out the Big Box and bring out all the tiles.

That could take a while, but the thought of a Carcassone-constructed megadungeon tickles me.

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6 Comments

  1. Mart van de Wege

    Hiya Keith,

    I think the cloisters might make good monster lairs. The ones connected to the road network are for monsters wandering the passages and the standalone cloisters are lairs for monsters that have ways to move outside the passages/rooms system (like digging or being ethereal).

    Mart

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