Carcassonne's simple mechanism — draw a tile, place it, potentially place a meeple — obscures a rich decision space that takes multiple plays to fully appreciate. The meeple economy is the game's deepest system. You have a limited number of followers and getting them returned efficiently creates a resource management puzzle within the tile placement.

Farmer scoring at game end creates a strategic layer that new players often ignore entirely. Farmers score at game end for completed cities adjacent to their fields but their followers are never returned during play. Understanding farmer timing and placement is the most significant intermediate skill in Carcassonne.

The Inns and Cathedrals expansion adds scoring variance that rewards risk-taking. The Tower expansion adds aggression that changes the social dynamic. For a first expansion, Inns and Cathedrals adds the most to the core experience without changing the game's character.