by hsiale
For a really epic game of Carcassonne I would stop at two ;) And many expansions of course, so that you always have to think about 10 things simultaneously.But if you want lots of players (and all those players are prepared that the game will have a lot of downtime, so they have something interesting to do while waiting till their opponents move) then go on. Base set + I&C has 90 tiles and allows for 6 players. That's 15 tiles per player. Using a set with all expansions you don't even need to double the base to get over 300 tiles, so even 10 players would have 30+ tiles for each of them. For me the natural maximal number of players for "Mega Carcassonne" is 12 - as when you want to build such set, the best way to do this is looking for someone selling a used set of Carcassonne with expansions. I recently bought for $75 (incl. shipping) a set of Carcassonne base game with all big expansions and some smaller ones (plus Carc: City spinoff game) exactly for this reason - I will repaint the meeples into new colours, leave castles, bridges, tower pieces and so on so that extra players can have those as well, and use 250+ tiles to make some unofficial expansions. Buying meeples alone gives you a problem of not having enough of the other things - a game where you start with one bridge and two tower pieces will definitely not be an epic one ;)