Normally a city is worth 2pts. per tile. A two tile city is only worth 1 pt. per tile for a minimum of 2pts. total.
We call our Carcassonne figures “meeples” for some strange reason. I believe that’s fairly standard for a lot of Carc players though.
Marc
MGibson:
As do we.
I mostly play Hunters & Gatherers and thus do this with rivers or forests rather than cities, but my group of friends calls this ‘boinging.’ As in, “…and I’ll boing for six points.” 'Cause the meeple, y’know, gets put down and then boings right back up again.
Where I grew up, we called this “being in the house.” Ergo, an acceptable substitute is, if wearing a pocketed shirt, to put the cards in your pocket, to show that you’re ready to “go home.”
A further reach on the pocket method was to turn the cards sideways and stick them in between the buttons of your (collared) shirt. I have no idea why.
Doesn’t everyone need change for 20 million people? 
In Star Fleet Battles, the various races had nicknames:
Gorn - Lizards
Romulans - Rommies, and after the first season of ST:TNG, the RCC (Romulan Catholic Church)
Federaton - Freds
Klingons - Klinks
Tholians - Rockheads
Kzinti - Kzits (The K is silent, you see)
And all homing weapons were called speed bumps, because they slowed down play.
I didn’t used to, but I’ve started in the last few years to do this. I pretend that I do it because it allows you to see at a glance how the board geography corresponds to what you still need, but actually it’s just an OCD-lite thing. (P.S. – they’re toasters!)
One more I remembered – in Magic, we referred to the Prodigal Sorcerer card as Tim.
–Cliffy
We call the 2-1 ports in Catan “-arators” example: sheeparator, clayarator
And my Carcassonne rules say 2 tile cites are 1 point per tile + 1 point per pennant. (typically 2 points total)
Brian
General House Rule, usable in any game:
If you get stuck in a cycle where your resources are miserable, the dice-roles keep sucking, you’re so deep in a hole that you’ve no chance of getting anywhere and basically you’re having no fun whatsoever, you can play the “Ebola Card” and take yourself out of that game. It’s assumed that all of your settlements/ships/teams/people got wiped out by ebola.
It developed because Settlers of Catan can be brutal on the resource end of things.
Oddly enough, Killer Bunnies actually has an ebola card (it works differently), but that came about after my gaming friends developed the house rule.
When playing Lord Of The Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth, I have found a phrase from another computer game to be quite helpful.
Every time Aragorn, Legolas et. al. kick the hordes of Mordor or Isengard off of one of the encampment points, I always find myself saying, “All your base are belong to us!”
That phrase works in soooo many other games as well.
In any RPG, we have the term ‘Swiftize’. This came from an overzealous player in a game long ago who would take anything that wasn’t nailed down, even durring combat when, say, he might be useful with his warrior skills helping the rest of the party. Ergo:
Swiftize: To completely and utterly ransack a room / area / corpse for anything of value.
In Trivial Pursuit, the “Sports & Leisure” category is known as “Nolan Ryan” due to the frequency with which Mr. Ryan was an answer in that category in the first edition. We will say things like “Everything else being equal, do you think we should go for Arts & Entertainment, or Nolan Ryan?”
There was one summer where a friend and I went on this Yahtzee playing jag. This was more Yahtzee than human beings were intended to endure. Two conversations converged at once – the proliferation of Star Wars themed board games that had nothing to do with Star Wars, and how poker has cute little slang names for all of the various hands. Hence, our names for Yahtzee rolls were born.
A yahtzee of fives was a “Rogue Squadron”
A yahtzee of sixes was a “Death Star”
A full house with ones and twos was a “Yoda’s Hut.”
I could go on, it made sense at the time. It was one of those “This is your brain. This is your brain on six hours of Yahtzee” things.
For card games: ‘idiot cards’ Any cards used in a system in which they are left face up on the table, not critical to play, but to help the players remember or keep track of something. Examples: various systems of using the 2’s & 3’s or 5’s to keep the running game score in Euchre; laying out 6-4 of hearts, 8 of diamonds, 6 of clubs and 4 of spades in Tyzicha as a reminder to all players of the relative value of marriages in the different suits (100 in hearts, 80 in diamonds, 60 in clubs, 40 in spades.)
My brother and his friends came up with that one, and it still makes me chuckle.
For similar reasons, when we get an arcane question asking for a person’s name, the guess is always Ub Iwerks. This comes from playing the Disney expansion set of Trivial Pursuit one vacation – Iwerks, one of the main animators during Disney’s early days, seemed to be the answer to a dozen questions over the course of the evening.
–Cliffy
“Tim” was a very common name for him pretty much everywhere, methinks. I didn’t get the name at first (I hadn’t seen the movie, you see), so he and all of his clones were all “prods” to me.
For similar reasons, our default answer to any soundtrack-related question on the film quiz machines you see in pubs over here is always “Hans Zimmer.”
Any Geography you don’t know … just say “Canada.”
Close, but not quite. If you complete a city using two tiles, you only get TWO points rather than FOUR, to avoid making the “quick four” too powerful. I don’t have the official rules to quote handy, but check out the
Carcassonne Rules Compilation.doc at
“Completed City (2 tile city) 2 points + 1 point per pennant
Completed City (3+ tile city) 2 points per tile + 2 points per pennant”
Perhaps the official rules say “one point PER TILE?”
I’ll double check when I get home. I admit these rules are a bit suspect because I don’t think it’s possible to make a 2 tile city with a pennant. (On preview, I see MGibson and N9IWP agree with me)
Our Carcassonne people are meeples, too.
If you “crunch” several sheep to rock and/or wheat when making a city, you must sing “We built this city… we built this city on blood of sheep.” (to the tune of “We built this city (on rock and roll)”)
(Oh, and the Trivial Pursuit things are “wedges,” and our standard answer is Richard Nixon.)
Well the rules say you ARE allowed to collect points for the re-used letters, just not the premium squares.
For instance, if I lay down COW (3+1+4) over a Triple word score square, I get 8*3 or 24 points. If you then tack on S (1), you only get 3+1+4+1, or 9. Not the triple word score.
And I’ll stop before this sounds any more like Clue (not the board game).
We used that too. “Prod” was a verb, not a noun, e.g., “OK, on my turn, I’ll prod your Llanowar Elves”.
Also in Magic: A “Speed Bump” is any small creature (which dies) used to block a large creature, especially as a last-ditch prolong-the-game measure, and especially if the large attacking creature had trample, so the block doesn’t even accomplish much.
The Benalish Hero card is always referred to as a “Bananalish Hero”, and costs 1 yellow mana to cast.
A weenie is any creature which is small, but either very cheap to cast, or generated in bulk by some other card. Saprolings, Bananalish Heroes, and goblins are all weenies. We also had a term for slowly killing an opponent by attacking with a single weenie for twenty turns (presumably because nobody managed to get anything else out), but I don’t remember what it was called.
When using a Nightsoil card to generate creatures (you remove two creature cards from anyone’s graveyard to put one weenie into play), the creatures removed from the graveyards are “fertilizer”.
And not exactly terminology, but a house rule: Whenever you have a card that gives you “one mana of any color”, unless you have need of a specific color, you must choose a different color each time. Thus, for instance, if a Bird of Paradise is my only source for red mana, I’m allowed to tap it for red to cast a fireball, but if I’m tapping mountains for the fireball anyway and the Bird of Paradise is just providing one more point of damage, then I have to tap it for an ultraviolet mana, or a plaid mana, or an ocher mana, or the like.
And on a completely different game, in Starcraft, the big gun on the battlecruiser isn’t the Yamato gun, it’s the Yo Momma gun.
In Magic, any creature whose abilities can be increased with the application of mana ("<Red>: Shivan Dragon gets +1/+0 until end of turn") is refered to as being “pumpable.” It is not required that this be said in a bad Austrian accent, it is merely unavoidable.
To us, it was either pumpable or had “pump up.”