Any smart variant for the Count to add strategy?

[youtch]

I am struggling to try to find or define a smart variant for the Count that would add more depth and strategy to the game. I need to confess that with very little success so far...

I hate the way the count rules are right now, as I believe that it perverts completly the initial philosophy of the games, and brings too much luck that undermined all the nice strategy elements.

I m exploring any option and most likely I will end up with the variant that has absolutly nothing to do with the original rule, like for my tower variant.

Any suggestion?

Thanks in advance for your help/contribution.

y.

[Boondocker]

A lot of people (seem to) use the tiles as an alternate starting setup, but do not use the mechanics.

The only other mechanical variant I can think of off of the top of my head is the Barbarian Horde, which replaces the tiles of the count's city with pillaged tiles. It's pretty complex, and interesting, though if you're worried about changing the game, it won't be what you're looking for. (Because it does.)

When I think about rules variants, it's rarely because I don't like the entire ruleset or aim of the expansion. It's more because I don't feel that the rules achieve the aim. (Catapult aside... in that one, the aim doessuck <rimshot>.)

I haven't played the Count, so I don't know how well it achieves its goals. It seems pretty spot on, from what I've read, though.

[Carcking]

We play our game using a draw bag. So what we do with the City of Carcassonne is we put the upper left corner tile in the draw bag with all the rest. This causes the City tile to come up randomly. We set the 11 remaining tiles aside until the corner city tile is played. It can only be played where the City will fit. We play holding 2 or 3 tiles so it's not a problem waiting for a place to play it if it won't fit at first. Once played the player is allowed to build the City and deploy a knight to claim the City for 12 points. Then the Count is entered and the game resumes.

One of the things that bugs me about the City is the random ability to just jump in and steal a feature you haven't worked for. It feels against the nature of the tactics of the game. Anyway, by making it come up randomly is limits its power to some degree as much of the game could have passed before it is played.

[youtch]

This variant is a nice way to integrate the city in the landscape, and delay the effect of the count. But we still needs to come up with a variant for the count itself

Like you said, I hate the impact of the count on tactic. I think we might consider rewriting the rules for the count from scratch.

Is there any additional use we could do of this purple meeple and those big city tiles?