Carcassonne: Inns and Cathedrals - Tips & Strategies

Since no one else can claim your abbey, there’s no reason to spend your big Meeple there, unless it’s your only meeple.

If you have a large farm and/or others are trying to connect and share your farm, use your large meeple as a farmer. This way you will have more farmers in your farm without having to give up as many regular meeples.

If a city has a cathedral and you stand little chance of sharing in the points, introduce new openings in the city as much as you can. If a single city edge is exposed, play a tile with 3 or 4 open city edges. Remember, an incomplete city with a cathedral is worth ZERO points in the endgame.

Also if you’re using the Carcassonne: Cult, Siege and Creativity expansion (which should be added here, ahem) lay siege to the city (e.g. add a siege tile to the city), thereby bringing it back to normal.

Of course, snookering the the city, playing tiles in such a way that none of the remaining tiles could complete the city, is worth considering, but
a) with all the expansions, there is a tile for every purpose
b) it’s hard to keep track of them all
c) the abbey from the Carcassonne: Abbey & Mayor expansion works anywhere

As a house rule, just play with the big meeple and not the extra tiles. Or if you want to play with the tiles but without some of the extra nastiness take out the two cathedral tiles before shuffling. Carcassonne is a flexible game and you should tailor it to your own preferences!

We play the Inns so that, for every extra Inn you place on your road, you get an extra point per tile as long as the road is completed. So if I have a completed road that is 10 tiles long and it has two Inns on it, I get three points per tile for a total of 30 points.