11

I understand how to use the Bridges (sort of), but I don't understand the strategy/purpose. In almost every expansion set the special rules or powers of the pieces makes sense to me but why would I play a bridge piece? If you are playing with the King set I understand there is a bonus for the longest road but other than that, what is the point of a bridge?

Pat Ludwig
  • 29,963
  • 6
  • 114
  • 155
Michelle
  • 111
  • 3

2 Answers2

11

Their primary purpose of bridges is to be able to play a tile that you normally could not because of a road.

You have more options to finish a construction, sabotaging with roads/farms becomes significantly harder.

Second, bridges strongly affect farms. As Nick already pointed out, farms turn out to be massively larger. It's not at all uncommon to have a single, huge farmland that spans the entire map, minus the tiny farms at the edges sealed off by towns obviously.

On the other hand, invading an already occupied farmland becomes a lot easier than before.

For example (assuming only base set + first expansion), without bridges, the only way to cross a street in order to invade a farm was with the cloister + single road tile. For that purpose, the Bridges & Castles expansion not only adds bridges, but also several tiles with broken roads to accomplish the same thing.

Hackworth
  • 51,002
  • 2
  • 133
  • 213
  • Interestingly I've got the official carcossonne on an Android device and farms don't continue under the bridge on there... – Ian Apr 30 '12 at 15:52
  • 2
    @Ian That's a bug or a wrongly implemented rule though. I have that expansion at home, and the rules explicitly state that bridges do not split farms. – Hackworth Apr 30 '12 at 22:56
4

The bridges help to significantly expand farmland, as farms continue underneath the bridges. Using them, you can make really quite massive farms, which means a truck load of points at game end.

Nick Shaw
  • 628
  • 1
  • 5
  • 10