So I'm playing in a Carcassonne tournament tonight, which will be my first time playing Carc in a competitive environment and probably one of the few times I've played it without expansions. The structure is 3 preliminary rounds of 4 player games with the top 2 ranked after that playing in a head to head match.

So with that said what are your tips for vanilla Carc? I'll start with my general rules of thumb I try to follow:

• Try and establish a farm early, generally on the side of the road with the city side on the starting tile (unless there's been a lot of city construction already on the other side (such as a split city tile)
• Try and join other people's established cities (and roads to a lesser extent) when possible, generally only help them finish if they're behind you in points or you need meeples back
• Don't try to have more meeples than your opponents in an area unless it's almost completed or it's worth a lot of points, just try and have the same amount
• Always use roads to either grow your farms or shrink you opponents, this means using corner/fork road tiles to turn roads away from your farm or to enclose theirs, one great example is trying to loop roads at one end (like a lasso shape) or add the monastary with the road coming out to expand the field to both sides of the road.
• When you get down to one or two meeples only use them if you're getting one back that turn (unless near the end of the game)