Carcassonne

Carcassonne (remember spellers, double the ‘s’ and double the ‘n’) is often highly ranked on lists of best “gateway games”, and I feel this is for good reason. With a lower entry price compared to some of its highly ranked brethren (Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride), Carcassonne is an easy game to teach and play. It has two major decisions a player needs to make each turn, with the first being very intuitive (drawing and placing a tile), and the second allowing for some strategy, while not overwhelming a new player with too many options.

Gameplay

Each player’s turn consists of three actions:

1) Draw and place a tile (required)
In a sense, you’re building a giant puzzle, but the pattern has not been predetermined. Each turn, a player will draw a tile (see the House Rules section of the site for variations on this) and place it into the growing landscape. Like a puzzle, a piece may only be placed where it “fits”, but instead of odd shapes allowing a piece to physically fit, you’re matching the edges. Cities attach to cities, roads to roads, and open land to open land.

2) Place a follower/meeple (optional)
On the tile you just placed, you may put one of your followers (a little wooden person known as a meeple). While your meeples are identical, they can be used in different ways, depending on what geographical feature you’re placing them on. They can be placed on roads, cities, farms, or cloisters with the game calling them thieves, knights, farmers, or monks respectively (I find it easier to just ignore the titles as it really doesn’t do anything for the game, they’re just meeples). Meeples are very polite and will only go on a feature if no other meeple has previously claimed it; no matter how many tiles away, if it’s connected and has a meeple on it, you can’t play your meeple on it.

3) Score completed features (when possible)
Roads, cities, and cloisters will score when they are completed. A road is completed when both sides have come to an end, or a loop has been made. A city is complete when it is completely surrounded by walls. A cloister is complete when its tile is completely surrounded by other tiles (all eight possible orthogonally and diagonally adjacent spots have tiles placed in them).

For these three features, whoever now has ownership will take back their meeple(s) and score points (1 per road segment, 2 per city segment, 9 points for completed cloister).

Farms are different as they are only scored at the end of the game. Depending on your game’s edition there are different scoring rules for farmers. In general, the idea is that the player with the most meeples in their color farming a city will gain points.

Game End

Play passes around with the next player taking their turn until all tiles are played. At the end of the game, points are awarded for uncompleted features, the farmers are scored, and the player with the most points wins.

My Thoughts

Carcassonne is a great game for introducing new players to modern boardgaming. There are primarily two things a player does on each turn, draw/place a tile, and decide whether to put a meeple on it. While there is some strategy to where you place your tile, the rules are very intuitive, and hardly seem like rules that need to be learned. By thinking of the game as building a puzzle, half of your rules are taken care of for you. In general I find having fewer rules a person has to “learn” makes a game more accessible and enjoyable (this is why later teaching a game with similar mechanics is easier – the player has already learned the basics of the mechanic, and just needs to understand how that mechanic relates to the new game).

By limiting the ability to place a meeple to only the tile just played, a gamer is not overwhelmed by multiple options. If a player were free to place a meeple on any tile on their turn, the game could easily double in length, especially with new players as they analyze every option. It’s worth noting that it wouldn’t be all that beneficial to go back to previous tiles and place anyway, so you’re not losing too many strategic options.

The difficulty in teaching/playing the game the first time is in the farmers. Having a piece that you play once and never get back, while hoping for points later, can be difficult for players to grasp. Without having a board setup in advance, it’s tough to illustrate how farmer scoring will work. The rulebook seems to have gotten better over time with illustrations, and unless you have a fully assembled board from a previous game, showing the figures in the rulebook is probably the best way to go.

There are those that recommend skipping farmers the first game. I personally like making all of the rules available to a player, but if you have younger players or people that are really having problems grasping the farmer rule, skipping farmers the first time may be beneficial. If you do this, I highly recommend, after final scoring, putting farmers down and showing exactly how they work on the completed board. It should only add a couple of minutes, and will make the rule more concrete for people who may play again in the future.

It generally takes some time for players to start seeing how multiple meeples can occupy the same road/city/farm. I enjoy seeing the delight people take in attempting to fight their way into a city, while another player desperately tries to shut everyone else out. Often such play doesn’t lead to optimal strategy, but you see people having fun, and looking ahead to future turns, which is a fantastic moment in any game. The rules give full points to all players that are tied when a feature scores, making it less likely a player will spend a quarter of their game going after something to find themselves completely shut out.

Carcassonne is a fairly simple game with quick enough play, easily grasped rules, and a hint of strategy that makes it one of my go to games for non-gamers. The ever growing countryside that appears on your table gives a shared sense of building something, while everyone can enjoy their turns without spending minutes agonizing over what to do. I highly recommend giving Carcassonne a try with younger gamers, or friends that have expressed an interest in learning about boardgaming.

And, if it ever gets stale for you, there are plenty of expansions to put the spice back into the game! Grab your meeple army and populate the countryside of Carcassonne!

Carcassonne is a fun tile laying euro game where your meeples set out to claim farmlands, cities, roads, and cloisters. Draw the right tiles and claim the right property and you can find yourself ahead and victorious!

GAME PLAY:
Carcassonne is an easy game to teach and learn. There are only a few basic moves and the pieces repeat regularly so there are no curve balls half way through the game. The game is played by drawing and playing a tile. On each tile there may be a city, road, cloister, and/or farmland. Only you can claim an area on your tile and you can only claim one area, even if there are several different area types on a single tile. You claim an area by playing one of your meeples on it to show that it is your land. Here’s a rundown of the different areas and how they work and score.

Farmland: Takes the most space of your land. It can yield quite a few points, or if you’re not careful, none at all. To claim a farmland you play your meeple on his side and he gets points for all the completed cities within your pasture land.

Roads: Simple to score and can quickly return your meeple back to your collection. You get one point for every section of road.

Cities: Cities give you two points per section if it is completed and one if not at the end of the game. There are also bonus tiles with a little blue shield that earn you two times the points for that tile.

Cloisters: These are your money makers. You get one point for every square around them, up to nine, counting itself.

Once you close a tile off by completely closing in your city or cloister you will get your meeple back to play him again on another piece of land, but you have to be careful in how you use them or you won’t have enough to go around.

COMPONENTS:
The components are pretty simple. Classic nice wooden meeples and sturdy cardboard tiles. We have played through this game many times and have seen little wear on the cardboard. You will get lots of play out of the pieces.

PROS:
• The game is easy to teach. There are just a few actions that can take place in the base game that make it easy for new players to learn how to place.
• Game play is fairly quick. It won’t take long to teach or play, allowing for lots of replay value.
• There are lots of expansions for this game to add on to it. You can play a short quick game with the base, or draw it out and really make it last with a few expansions.

CONS:
• I think the game is more luck based then strategy based. You never know what tile you are going to pull, but you do have to know how and where to put your meeple.
• At first its difficult to say Carcassonne. We pronounce it car-cas-sone.

OVERALL:
I would say this is a pretty decent game. All of the components and mechanics work very well. That being said, Carcassonne is not a game that I long to play. I was recently at a dinner party, and while some of us guys were waiting on the ladies we hashed out a game. It’s a good filler game, and I could see how others would be more obsessed with it and want more or all of the expansions. Final words… I’m glad one of my friends owns it, but that I don’t.

I was recommended this game and decided to give it a try with the family to see if I could move them on from the long drawn out arguments resulting from a game of Monopoly….

I am not going to give a detailed overview of how the game is played since there are many of these on here already. Instead I will give a summary of the main things I like about the game.

The Results:
It was a really easy game to play with all the family (wife and daughters aged 10 & 12). Everyone got to understand the rules quickly and could see how we could support each other in deciding where to place the tiles. The children enjoyed seeing some victory points being earned early on in the game from the robbers. The game is quite short (less than an hour) so it avoids dragging on like some other games can. The games vary every time since there is a randomness in the order that tiles are drawn, therefore making the game board change each time.

Having played it with family, I found it great to play with friends as well, which provides for a more strategic game as people are trying to plan further ahead to ensure victory at the end of the game.

The Expansions:
Having played the game and enjoyed it, the expansions have started finding their way into the house. Initially the “King & Scout” and “River II” because these were cheap little add-ons for the children to get. All the expansions add more variety to the game and my local game store (Avon Toys in Leamington Spa) has them all in stock most of the time. More expansions will certainly be bought in the future.

The Future
Definitely will buy more expansions, and will play it with more friends, who really like the idea of the game. Going to meet up in a couple of weeks at our local games club to have a proper go with better gamers, but certain that this will be as much fun.

Summary
A “must have” game for any collection – great to play with gamers, friends or family and pick some of your favourite expansions to add more variety (they are priced £4.99-14.99 in the UK and probably a lot less in the US!!) and are certainly worth the money. If you are really into it, watch out for the box set which comes with the game and loads of the expansions as well!

Carcassonne is a great game. It is extremely simple to understand, very quick to set up and has great replay value.

So what is Carcassonne?

Really? You’ve never heard of it?

Nope.

Well then you’re in for a treat. Take my word for it, go and get this game and play it.

I’m going to need more convincing than that. How do you play it?

In Carcassonne there are lots of square tiles. On the tile there is a small segment of a map. At the start of the game there is only one tile down (the starting tile), and all the other tiles are turned face down so none of the players can see them (in fact I would recommend you go all-out and get yourself a bag to put them in). In turn each player chooses a tile at random, reveals the tile and adds it to the other tiles, building the map as you go along.

I’m guessing there’s some kind of scoring to this?

Yes there is! Each player has a set of small wooden people, which are called “meeples”. The map that you build up with the tiles has fields, cities, roads and cloisters. On your turn, the features on the tile you place have to align with the tiles already in play (i.e. a field has to align with a field, a road has to align with a road and so on). After placing your tile down you have the option of putting one of your meeples on one of these features if it is unoccupied. If a feature is completed you pick up your meeple and gain a score based on the size and type of the feature.

– A road is complete when it is continuous with a start point and end point (for example a crossroads or it enters a city). It scores one point per tile.
– A city is complete when it has a continuous boundary and no tiles are missing inside it. It scores two points per tile, plus an extra two points for every shield it contains (some of the city segments have a shield on).
– A cloister is complete when it is surrounded by tiles (including diagonals, i.e. it is at the centre of a 3×3 square). It scores 9 points (one for the cloister tile and 1 for each tile surrounding it).
– A field is never completed during the game.

At the end of the game any meeples still in play are scored.

– Any uncompleted roads score one point per tile.
– Any uncompleted city scores one point per tile, plus one point per shield.
– Any uncompleted cloister scores on point for the cloister tile plus one point for any tile surrounding it (including diagonals).
– Fields score 3 points for each complete city it touches.

The highest score wins!

So what makes this game fun?

Many things. First there’s the strategy element, placing a tile can be advantageous to you or disadvantageous to your opponents (or both). I think it’s best to show everyone each tile as it is chosen, and everyone can talk and argue about where it should be placed (of course, it is up to the player who picked up the tile to decide). Also, although you can’t put a meeple on a feature where another player already has a meeple, it is possible to have features “join up” and share or steal points from an opponent. Finally, bear in mind you only have a limited number of meeples, so there’s always the decision to be made if you want to use one up because you might not get it back until the end of the game.

OK, I’m sold.

I knew you would be.

Carcassonne is a gateway game of tile-laying and worker placement, introducing two fundamental strategies that will make it easier to learn more complex Euro-style games later on in your Hobby development.

That is not to say that this is only a game for beginners, or isn’t a complete game in itself. Much the opposite. For many gamers, including my wife, this is a timeless classic that gets lots of plays, and can be a welcome gaming experience when you don’t feel like learning something new, or want to play with people who are not “gamers” who typically play Euros.

Lets look at the nitty gritty of the game:

Components:
The main game components are a Score Board containing the scoring track,
MANY tiles (which can be added to with expansions),
Wooden tokens shaped like little people (affectionately called Meeple) in each players’ colors (some expansions add new types of tokens).

Setup:
One specific tile is placed in the center of the playing area as the starting position for gameplay. The rest of the tiles are placed upside down and shuffled (or placed into a drawstring bag).

Gameplay:
The sum total of the actual gameplay is as follows: Each player, on their turn, draws a random tile, places it on the growing map, and may, optionally, place one of their Meeple on the tile that they just placed. That is the entirety of the gameplay.

Strategy:
There doesn’t seem to be much to the game by this description, but the strategy comes from the rules for tile placement, and the decisions for placing your Meeples (also with it’s own set of rules) to either score more points, or deny your opponents opportunities to score.

Tile placement rules:
Tiles must be placed so that they
1. must connect to an existing tile on the board.
2. features on the side(s) that connects to other tiles must connect to the same feature on the other tile.

For example: roads must connect to roads, cities to other cities, and fields to other fields. A road cannot end connecting to an emply field, or run into a city at the edge of the tile, a city tile edge cannot connect to a field edge, and so on.

When tiles are placed, their features instantly become part of the features that they connect to: a city on the tile becomes part of the existing city that it connects to, as do roads and fields. They are not separate ones if they connect. If they do not physically connect to existing features, then they are new ones, not connected to the existing features, though they might join up later. Much of the games strategy comes from this.

Worker placement rules:
You may only ever place a worker on the tile that you just placed this turn. You may only place your worker on a feature that is unoccupied by any other meeples of any player including yourself. Once placed, meeple are locked in position until they score. Meeple placed on roads become highwaymen. Meeple placed in cities become guards. Meeple placed in fields become farmers.

Scoring rules:
Highwaymen score when the road they are placed on closes on both sides. Roads close when they connect to anything else, including other different roads at an intersection point on a tile. Roads score one point per road section on each tile. The shortest possible road is two sections.

Guards score when they cities they are in become fully enclosed by walls. Cities score two point per city section on each tile, with some bonus points for “shields” on the city spaces. The smallest possible city is two sections, but only scores two points instead of four.

Farmers score at the end of the game. Any farmer placed in a field is locked until the game is over.

Here’s the catch: Only the majority player in each feature scores the points. If one player has two meeples in a city, but another player has three meeples, then only the second player gets the points when the city closes.

It is especially painful to lose fields in this manner, so always be mindful of farmers, and who is placing them where. One tile can join two fields together, completely changing it’s ownership.

Some expansions change these scoring rules.

Summary:
There is a lot more to Carcassone than first meets the eye. It can be a very light friendly game, suitable for children and family groups, and to introduce Euro games to non-hobbyists. It can also be a brutal cutthroat game suitable for tournaments and hardcore strategists, where the struggle is to lock your opponent’s meeple permanently with as low a score as possible. This is a remarkable accomplishment for such a very simple game. It’s not one of my favorites, but I will gladly play this game, even after over a decade of plays.

What constitutes a classic? The Morgan is a classic car because of its history and enduring style. Citizen Kane is a classic film because of its great story and filming techniques that still seem fresh today. What about classic games? Monopoly? Chess? Carcassonne?

Carcassonne is the fortified city in the south of France and is also a tile laying game that is deceptively simple to play. Each turn a player takes a random tile and flips it over to reveal its features. Each tile contains sections of cities, roads, farms or a single cloister. The player then places this down so that it fits with pieces already on the table. The player can then place down one of their followers; tiny wooden people often nicknamed meeples, onto one of the features on the tile. When the city, road or cloister is completed the player scores points based on the number of tiles used and the follower is returned to the player. Farms are scored a little differently with players gaining points at the end of the game based on the number of completed cities the farm connects to. A player can’t claim a city, road or farm that has already been occupied by another player but with careful tile placing two features can be joined to steal locations off opponents.

Carcassonne’s rules are simple enough to make it a great family game but there’s enough depth to build deeper strategy. Farms can be fenced off with roads, cities can be blocked by an awkward road location and both features can be stolen. The game plays between 2 and 5 players and it tends to work best with 3 or 4 players. At this level there is a good balance of strategy and randomness and more chance that the opposing players can screw up you plans. At 2 players you can end up doing your own thing at opposite ends of the table and with 5 players things can be a bit crowded. More players also mean more downtime. Carcassonne is a game that can lead to a lot of analysis paralysis; the dreadful situation that exists when players stop and think carefully about their move causing the game to grind to a halt. The more players you have the more this becomes a problem.
The game comes with a handy scoreboard for, well, keeping score obviously.

The most contentious issue with the game is the farm scoring system. Farms are the most strategic mechanic in the game, only 3 points per city seems like a meagre amount of points at stake but if you can connect a farm to a lot of cities there are a lot of points up for grab. The concept itself isn’t complicated but scoring farms at the end of the game is prone to errors. It relies on players visually inspecting the entire board and tracing the network of road and cities that act as barriers. You may want to ignore farm scoring for a simpler game and this is strongly recommended for younger players.
Early in the game and some one has left that big city on the right unclaimed, crazy fools!

The components have a classic enduring appeal. The basic tiles are sturdy and thick and the meeples themselves are wooden, a material that always adds a touch of class to the game. What is lacking is some form of draw bag for the tiles (though one is available in the Traders & Builders expansion).

A typical game of Carcassonne will last around 45 minutes to an hour, an almost perfect game length for a game of this depth. There are a lot of expansions available for Carcassonne and these will be covered in more depth in later reviews but it’s worth noting that all the expansions add extra tiles, which in turn make the game longer to play. Too many expansions and Carcassonne loses the brevity that makes it a great game.

Carcassonne is a classic game. Like all the best games the rules are simple and easy to learn but offer a depth of strategy that give the game longevity and interest. Its quick to play and completing high scoring features is a gratifying experience.

Also posted on my blog at http://www.polyhedroncollider.com

Get a medium size to large table, open up the Carcassonne box, and build cities and roads and fields until the cows come home. Because cows in your home might knock over the table and mess up your game of Carcassonne so that might be a good place to stop.

Carcassonne is a game of tiles. It’s like a multiplayer puzzle. Each player picks a tile and places it on the board/table/floor/playing area. This tile will have different things on it such as a field, or part of a road, or maybe even a city wall. These pictures must match up to their surrounding tiles and build off them. Once you complete a section, such as completely walling off a city, you get the points for that city if you have claimed it.

You claim an area by placing a meeple on it. A meeple is a little wood or plastic person-ish shaped counter. The most points at the end of the game wins. Fairly simple, pretty straight forward, but the end result is usually an entertaining game and a funky looking french countryside littered with the oddest shaped cities and most ignorant road placement you have ever seen.

Pros:
-Easy to learn.
-Good play time. Not too long, but not too short.
-MEEPLES! What more do you need man?

Cons:
-There is a lot of luck involved concerning tile draws, but not so much that it overrides good decision making on placement.
-Some of the scoring might be a little confusing at first, but nothing a game or two more won’t fix.

Conclusion:
Look. This is a very popular game for a reason. It’s not super flashy and the box might not exactly scream “Excuse me kind sir. Will you please play me because I’m fun and WOW EXPLOSIONS!” or anything like that, but after your first game you will see why so many people put this game so high on their list. Some people use it as a gateway game to get new players interested. The really good thing is that even after they are hooked, they will come back to Carcassonne again and again even after they are addicted to the sweet sweet drug of board gaming.

In the game of Carcassonne you and your opponents build a middle-ages land. Yes, the whole land: with its fortified towns, meandering roads, solitary cloisters and cultivated fields. The game contains a number of square terrain tiles that represent these structures or their fragments. Players take their turns putting those tiles on the table; in the process the appropriate features on the tile edges (i.e. roads, towns, fields) have to meet their counterparts on all the tiles the newly positioned one touches.

On a freshly placed tile the active player may put an inhabitant: in a cloister it will be a monk, on a field – a peasant and so on. (The small wooden dweller figurines are nicknamed “meeples”. This strange name is meant to be an abbreviation of “my people”; it is used now for any similar wooden figurines in many games, but the first use of this term was for the very game of Carcassonne.) When a structure is finished the player with most meeples in/on that structure is rewarded with a number of victory points.

The game is pretty simple and easy to learn. It allows a lot of playing styles: from concentrating on one’s own structures only, through competing for dwellers majority up to deliberate putting terrain tiles to disturb opponents’ creations.

At the end the players may marvel the world they have made. No kidding here – the landscape created during the game often has a substantial aesthetic value!

The main drawback of the base game – in my opinion – is that it is too short. The number of tiles should be higher. Fortunately, there are a lot of expansions around and one can always add a bunch of expansion tiles to the mix – even when sticking to the basic game rules!

Carcassonne is a game that helped open the doors for Euro Games for many people, it was one of the first games I started with and in the beginning I made sure to get the latest expansion. However there are so many great games that come out every year and my life got so busy that I forgot all about this wonderful game and my copy ended up…well I actually have no idea where it ended up.

For a full Review complete with full sized images go to http://toddsboardgames.blogspot.ca/2013/01/carcassonne.html

I borrowed a copy from my local gaming store and showed it to a couple friends last night. Other than scoring details I didn’t have to even look at the rules it all came back to me fairly quickly but much to my surprise I ended up placing last? This is one of the greatest intro games around and this review is going to explain why.

Gameplay:

The gameplay is really very simple, you turn over a tile, place it somewhere so that all of its edges match up (a road cant run right into a field and your castle cannot have a field for a wall, etc) and you then have the option of placing a wooden man on the tile or not. Where you place the man determines how you will score points. Here are the options for placing your workers:

Castle: A completed castle is worth 2 points for every section as well as 2 points for every ‘shield’ or pendent. Only the player with the MOST workers will score points, if there is a tie players will split the points. Completing a castle results in your men inside being returned to you. At the end of the game every incomplete castle tile and pendent is worth 1 point.

Road: Each section of road is worth 1 point to you, if you complete the road your men on it are returned to you. At the end of the game unfinished road sections are worth 1 point each.

Farm: A well placed farmer can turn the entire game around. Your farmer is not returned and once you place him you cannot get him back until the end of the game. However at the end of the game every castle inside your farmer’s field will score you 3 points. Fields are separated by roads, other tiles and non existent tiles. You simply trace the field around and any castle inside of it scores you 3 points, I recommend scoring farming last and using your wooden people that you are not using anymore to mark castles so you make sure to score them all and make sure not to double score one.

Monastery: When you place a monastery you are trying to form a ‘cluster’ that is all the areas adjacent to the monastery including diagonals. If you finish your ‘cluster’ your man is returned and you score 9 points. At the end of the game unfinished clusters award 1 point for every adjacent tile and 1 point for the monastery tile itself. It is a good idea to hold 1 worker back in case you draw a monastery tile.

Components: The tiles are solid quality as are the wooden men that have become a staple for euro games. The base game comes with a free ‘river’ expansion. If you want to expand your Carcassonne collection there are mini expansions that include a few tiles and meeples and expansions that include a wheel of fortune, a tower, a catapult. Although the artwork seems a little outdated and does look a little old Carcassonne is more than 10 years old now, its a classic and remains a great starter game.

Who is going to enjoy playing Carcassonne? Simple. Everyone.

Family Gamers: There is no conflict or adult themes in this game, you are simply placing tiles to complete different structures and placing wooden men to claim the structures as your own. The mechanics in the basic game are simple enough that anyone can play so its fun for kids and adults. There is no text involved so simply explain the different ways to score and I can almost guarantee Carcassonne will be a hit!

Casual Gamers: Carcassonne hits a number of points on the head for casual gamers. It is light (there are not a ton of rules) it is fast playing (our game was about 30 minutes with 2 people having never played) but there is still enough to the game that it leaves you wanting to play again. Even with the simple mechanics there are still a ton of choices to be made and different ways to score this gives options and options get people hooked. Carcassonne is a great game on its own and can be used as a great bridge to get into more advanced games.

Gamer Gamers: There are tons of expansions out there for Carcassonne and adding a couple of the right ones can make the game more complex for advanced gamers. Plus for people with strategic minds there is a lot more going on, you can look at the number of tiles left and plan if you should try to finish your castle or bother starting something new, you can use your pieces to block other players and if you play your tiles right you can sneak into a castle that someone spent the last 10 turns building. There are a ton of options and if you add the expansions you can turn Carcassonne from an intro game into something much much more.

No board game exceeds Carcassonne in the rules to fun ratio.

As city-builders in medieval France, players vie for creation and control of most impressive features of sprawling countryside – immense cities, isolated cloisters, winding roads and fertile farms. Control of each feature scores you points. Player with most points at the end wins.

Each turn a new tile is turned over with landscape elements and must be placed adjacent to existing tiles so that all elements match (e.g. roads continued, city walls linked, fields sprawling out). A meeple from a limited source is then placed to “stake out” the feature. Meeples stay on until the feature is complete, at which point they come back to supply.

While you can’t add your meeple to a feature someone is building, you can link your road/city with someone else’s to piggyback on their work, or even take it over entirely. This introduces a non-obvious but tense player interaction. So does placing a tile in a way that prevents your opponents from reaching their goal – blocking out their unchecked expansion of cities etc.

There is a fair bit of strategy in Carcassonne, a staggering achievement for the simplicity of the rules, but not an unlimited amount. It is beautifully simple, elegance of design exemplified. The player interaction is not aggressive but competitive, striking another fine balance.

The only tricky part comes in one specific part of scoring (namely farms) that takes some getting used to. It can be easily avoided though as most people will introduce the game without that particular element and add it in several games later. For some players even the farmerless version will be enough and that’s perfectly cool.

Carcassonne does not do well as a “feature” game for game nights – not enough meat there. It will not engage experienced players for extended length of time. Expansions attempt to add the complexity and whether these succeed is a matter of reviewing these products. The base game should be judged for what it is – a beautiful simple design approachable by anyone, enough to get people hooked on a wonderful world of modern board games.

I think all of us who enjoy the hobby owe a great deal to this game for its contribution to the genre and all the boardgamers it helped spawn.