Carcassonne: The name evokes an idyllic beautiful pastoral French countryside. Or a bunch of tiles with people figurines confidently stradling roads, cities, and fields.

Before I divulge my modification, let me explain a little about the game. Carcassonne is a German-style board game. (Often it is considered a “gateway game” to the style for its quick and simple play.) The game consists of several tiles with parts of a landscape printed on them — field, river, city, road, and monastery. To begin the game, one player places the start tile atop the table, and has the choice to play a meeple. Then play passes onto the next player, who picks up an unknown tile. He or she must place the tile to match the landscape pictures on the existing tile, and may also play a follower (affectionately known as a meeple) on a feature of the tile. No one may place a meeple on a feature already claimed if the feature extends across touching tiles. When features are completed the player with who has the most meeple on the feature scores points.

We bought expansion pack which added new tiles and, more importantly, the capability to add a sixth player. However, the sixth player meeples were gray which we thought an unimaginative colour. Since the original colours were black, yellow, green, blue, and red, we decided purple would make a great addition to those colours. I bought some model paint and a brush and got to work. Surprisingly they required more coats of paint than expected.

Also included in the expansion pack were large meeple which counted as two meeple for the purposes of the game. Inexplicably, the large meeple are only 4 mm taller (sadly, I actually measured this) than a regular meeple. To help distinguish them, Heather used a silver Sharpie™ to mark a crescent on them, which resembles a small smile.