Bridges - How to connect farms across roads

Bridges can be extremely useful in building and expanding your farm, because you can use a bridge to connect the farmland on both sides of a road.

1. Placing Tile

Just like in the base game, you must place tiles so that its edges match the edges of the tiles already in play. After placing a tile, you may1 Note the use of the word "may" in the statement. A player is NOT required to use a bridge to place a tile, even if that tile would otherwise have to be discarded. The player has the choice to use the bridge to place the tile or just discard the tile. place a bridge, which counts as a road and connects roads over features or meeples on that tile.2As with normal roads, each end of the bridge must continue a road segment (or bridge) already in play or must be adjacent to an empty place for a tile.

You can place one bridge on the tile you just placed, or on a tile touching the tile you just placed. When placing a bridge, you must place both ends in a field, and it must be placed facing either left-to-right or up-to-down (it cannot be placed diagonally across the tile). Once placed, a bridge remains on that tile until the end of the game.

In this example: The field on the left side of the new tile connects the field below the bridge to the field above the bridge.

You can place a tile so that a road ends against a field, but you must place a bridge that continues the road on that same turn. You can use multiple bridges in a row along the same road, but each tile can have a maximum of only one bridge on it.3One tile cannot have 2 bridges running perpendicular to each other. The rules state that the bridge must lie on a field, and if bridges are stacked, one end of the top bridge will not touch the field. Bridges can be placed on tiles with meeples on them.

2. Placing Meeple

After placing a tile, you can place a Meeple normally. If you build a bridge on the tile you just placed, you can place your meeple (or another figure) on the bridge as if it were a road.

NOTE: When placing a tile, with or without a bridge, which connects your farm to a barn field, placing your meeple comes before scoring, therefore, it is legal to place your pig on the new tile's connecting field so that your completed cities will score 2 points instead of only 1 point.

3. Scoring

Fake Bridges

Before we purchased Expansion 8: Bridges, Castles & Bazaars; we cut strips of 3/8 inch oak into tile size lengths to be used as Fake Bridges. Even after purchasing Expansion 8, we were still using them because they are easier to use.

Then, we cut some 1/4 inch oak strips into smaller Fake Bridges.

There has been some talk, but nothing has been agreed to, to allow the original Fake Bridges to be used as Gates and/or Walls to help in the closing of the 4 sided holes that are used to trap Meeples on the board until the end of the game.

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