Australian Carcassonne Championships

The officially sanctioned Australian Carcassonne Championships are held each year at the Australian Games Expo.

Prizes:	1st prize: Return airfare & 5 nights' accommodation for the World Championships, held in October at Essen Spiel in Germany. 2nd prize: One Carcassonnebox - the solution to all your Carcassonne storage needs 3rd prize: Signed Copies of either Seafarers of Catan or Cities and Knights of Catan
Sponsor:	Thanks to our generous sponsors Ventura Games (Airfare) and Funatical (Accommodation)
Format:	Two-player matches. Four swiss-style qualifying rounds are held over the weekend, with a semi-final (top 4 players) and a best-of-three final on Sunday afternoon. These games use 25 second turns, which results in each game taking 30 minutes to run. See Tournament Schedules for session times.
Registration:	Entry fee is $25 for each tournament, and MUST be paid on registration to ensure your place in the tournament. You must pre-register if you wish to play in this tournament. Registrations will be accepted up until 5pm, 31st May 2008 Only Australian residents may enter the tournament. Register now to secure your place.
Tournament Director:	Neil Thomson
Previous Results:	Congratulations to Peter Parkes, winner of the 2007 Australian Carcassonne Championships. Peter defeated his wife Naomi in the best-of-three final. More 2007 results 2006 results

Rules of the Carcassonne Games - Explanations:

All games are played only with the basic Carcassonne game, with the following rule variations:

Cities with two tiles give four points (not two).
The Farmers value is calculated like this:
For every meadow the number of farmers is calculated and a player with the most farmers receives 3 points for every city at that meadow.
Note that every player can only get the points for one city once (even if this city would have given points at two meadows to that player).

Carcassonne Tournament Rules

These tournament rules can be found on the official site: Spielezentrum Herne. We encourage all players to read and understand them before the tournaments begin.

The tournament is played with the Swiss system using the Buchholz-method (or Solkoff) as a tiebreaker (the lowest result of an opponent is discarded) in a starting pre-elimination phase. The pre-elimination is a 4 round tournament at two player tables.

After these four rounds the best two players play out a final game. The starting player in these final is the player with the better ranking after 4 games. If there is a tie in the final, the game must be replayed, the player ranked second as starting player this time. If there still is a tie after two games, then the player ranked higher in the first 4 rounds is the winner.

For all games just the standard Carcassonne box is used.

Explanation: Swiss system

In the pre-elimination games the number of victories will be counted. We will use the Buchholz (Solkoff) method to resolve ties. This means that for every player the number of victories of his opponents will be summed up. For this the result of the weakest opponent will be discarded.

If there are still ties, then the difference of victory points over all four games will be summed up and used as tie-breaker.

The schedule for the first round will be determined by drawing lots (done by a software solution).

After that the schedule will be determined by the current ranking, where the players ranked 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6 and so on will compete against each other. In addition to that we will take care that players do not have to play against each other twice (if possible). Then the next suitable player in the ranking will be determined (this actually will be done by a software solution as well).

In every game the starting player is the player that has started fewer times. In case of ties the player placed at position one in a game by the software is the starting player.

Time regulation:

All games will be played with time regulation using chess watches. Every player gets a total of 15 minutes to finish the game (so he has an average of 25 seconds to place a tile). This means no game will last longer than 30 minutes.

To give players a little more time to think about their move, they should draw the next tile immediately after finishing their move, while the other player is doing his move. Playing this way is allowed at the world championships and we encourage players to play this way to avoid getting in time troubles.
If a player exceeds the time limit he loses the game - the game ends immediately.