Carcassonne is unique in having a 4-player Mulligan Round before advancing into Single Elimination 2-player games.	Eli Zlotowski and Mattthew Morgal crack jokes at the Meeples expense. Say it ain't so!

Revenge of the Uncles ...

The saga continues: the 2011 edition of the Carcassonne tourney saw a battle for family honor, the MIA of a few recent champions, and the continuing question of "how do I score my farmers and what are they worth?". Let's deal with the last question first. When Carcassonne was released in 2000 by Hans im Glück Games, farmers were originally scored by cities: look at each completed city and count who has the most farmers in all the fields touching that city. The player(s) with the most farmers receive four points for that city. Also when a two-tile city was completed, it was worth two points. Some people found this method of scoring complicated, so the second German edition had a new method for scoring: rather than score each city, players should look at each field to determine who had the most farmers. The player(s) who had the most farmers in that field would then get three points for each city adjoining the field. HOWEVER, each city could only be scored once per player. So if you had the most farmers in two different fields adjoining a city, you could only count the city once. Two-tile completed cities still counted for two points.

This "solution" proved no less confusing then the original and now players had to keep track if a city had been scored already. So when Rio Grande Games released the game in the US, they decided to stick with the original rules. This resulted in two differing sets of official rules. As we now know, Carcassonne became wildly popular and is still an annual best seller. In the most recent third edition in an attempt to standardize the rules worldwide, the scoring rules have been tweaked yet again. It is similar to the second edition rules with two significant differences: a city may now be scored multiple times and, in an often overlooked rule change, two-tile completed cities are now worth four points so there is no special exception to the city scoring. Well with all this confusion between different published rule books it was only natural that there would be some confusion in the scoring. Going forward we will stick to the third edition rules which also looks to be the best balance between farmer and city scoring.

In the multi-player mulligan round this year, we still had a noticeable shortage of the "Inns and Cathedral" expansion. I believe this is one of the best of the numerous Carcassonne expansions since it makes very few additions to the rules (the addition of one super Meeple per player, and tiles that make roads [Inns] and cities [Cathedrals] score double if finished and nothing if not) while adding many new tiles combinations missing from the base set. But given the lack of necessary copies available, we will go back to the basic set for the 2012 multi-player mulligan round.

Two of our recent champions (Lisa Gutermuth and Katie McCorry) missed WBC this year. However, two-time champion Robbie Mitchell and defending champion Carolyn Strock were on hand to compete. An added incentive this year for the winner was a donated Meeple Plushie. Last year's runner-up, Arthur Wines, returned to WBC for one day this year just to win the Carcassonne championship and reclaim bragging rights from his niece Carolyn. Mission accomplished! In the end, the string of six championships won by the werewolf generation came to an end and Arthur served notice that us teetering old folk aren't quite done yet.

Michael Mullins and Vassili Kyrkos try thair hand in the Single Elimination rounds.	Ryan Houman faces Arthur Wines in the Final with Carolyn's uncle triumphant.