Caveat: I represent Rio Grande Games, the original American publisher of Carcasssonne, at game conventions.
My favorite version of the game to teach is Hunters and Gatherers. It has fewer rules than the original game and is easier to teach.
I wanted to mention that my girl friend and I have now tried Carcassonne South Seas. It’s not an expansion; it’s a self contained game and more affordable than the other spin offs.
It was really fun. The rules are basically the same but scoring is different. You capture resources and use them to buy tiles that have point values. There are no farms per se. The closest equivalent are Sea zones and they work more like the rest of the game does in that you capture them and then pick your Meeple up. It has subtle differences from the main game that I think I may like better.
Yeah, I’ve played it once, and would like to play it again. What I really like about the scoring system is that it strongly encourages you to diversify. It would be like if you were playing normal Carcassonne but couldn’t win unless you got decent number of points from each of roads, and from cities, and from cloisters, and from farms.
That might be an interesting way to play normal Carcassonne, actually… track your points from each of the four sources separately, then throw out whichever two you score the most from, or something like that.