Carcassonne: The Phantom, A Must-Have Mini Expansion for Carcassonne

Carcassonne: The Phantom

Carcassonne: The Phantom is my favorite mini expansion for Carcassonne. I consider it a must-have, though it’s now out-of-print and hard to find.

The Phantom shadows your followers. With Carcassonne: The Phantom Mini Expansion, when you place a meeple on a tile, you may also place your Phantom (if not already in play) on the same tile, but on a different feature. For example, say you were placing a tile with both a road and city feature and you have a dilemma: if you place your meeple on the road, it will complete a 2-point road, but if you place it in the city, you’ll have a knight in place with potential for bigger scoring later.

Carcassonne: The Phantom in play
Photo courtesy of Daniel Danzer.

This is a situation in which your Phantom really shines. Place a regular meeple in the city as a knight, then place your Phantom on the 2-point road as a robber, score it and take him back. When you get your Phantom back from scoring, you may use him again in a later turn. You can also place The Phantom all by itself as a regular follower. Of course, he won’t come back to your supply until the feature you placed him on is completed and scored.

With The Phantom at your service, you no longer have to choose between placing a meeple on a football city (two-tile city) for a quick four points or a farm for long-game scoring potential. You can do both: place a regular meeple on the farm and your Phantom on the football city, score the four points for the city and take your Phantom back to work another quick-scoring tile later. Now do you see why I love The Phantom?

Carcassonne: The Phantom color options

If that wasn’t enough, Carcassonne: The Phantom comes in an awesome meeple-shaped transparent plastic container. It comes in all the normal Carcassonne meeple colors, except grey, which is purple, so you can choose a meeple container that matches your preferred player color.

Contents: 6 transparent meeples (1 in each of 6 player colors: red, yellow, green, blue, black and purple (for grey), in a transparent, plastic meeple-shaped box.

Copyright © 2014-2015 by Tina G. McDuffie. All rights reserved.
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