Carcassonne - Tips & Strategies

This is a strategy for a competitive game. Don’t use it when playing a friendly game and don’t use it against children. Married male players, think twice before using it against your wives! You have been warned. 😉

When you draw your tile you should consider where to place it to get as much as you can from that play. This is obvious. But it happens quite often that you may well place it here and there for a more or less equal gain. Sometimes it even does not suit your plans at all so you just want to put it as far from your structures as possible…

In such a case look where that tile will obstruct your opponents’ structures. Big unfinished cities are obvious targets but in fact any started town or road can be one. Such obstructing tiles make your opponents look for specific matching tiles to finish their structures. If you find such a target place your tile nearby!

Sometimes those structures just remain unfinished to the end of the game (thus they give less points). Sometimes they are finished later, but even it that cease blocking does its job, because it freezes meeples for a number of turns – and thus restricting possible choices of blocked players.

I have a six year old that loves this game. The only thing is that farming is still too much. So with kids age 5-6 just skip the farming.

You should avoid situations where all your meeples are on the board. Opportunities come and go and you would better be ready to catch them and claim a town or a road with your follower. So if it happens that you have all your meeples placed, try to recover one of them even for an otherwise small profit. Most of the time it will pay off.

Some players don’t like using the farmer meeples because they have to stay in play for the whole game, but I’ve found that just one or two well-strategized farmers are all you really need to reap huge rewards at the end of the game. Get your farmers down early, and look for spots that will most likely remain open and wide (ie don’t put your meeple down on land that is already looking to be closed in by roads). And strategize to keep opening land up by diverting roads and building small castles. This will monopolize land from others, and will score huge points for even small castles.

Remember, if you add a road leading into a spot where your opponent is trying to build/continue a city – it adds another requirement for the tile they need to put in there, making it tougher on them. Direct your roads that way so that others don’t build their cities wherever they feel like.

When we clean up–and by “we” Gamer Bling means himself, because the Official Companion and the Expansions scoot from the table as soon as scoring is complete–we pick up the tiles in a semi-random fashion that shuffles as it goes.

When cleaning up, try picking up one tile, then picking up the next tile two rows over and one column to the side. This way the two tiles have nothing directly to do with each other, not even a common neighbor (in contrast, picking up adjacent tiles can lead to a streak of city tiles, for example). When you hit the edge of the map, change direction arbitrarily.

This pattern can be done quickly, ranging back and forth across the board, and creates a result that is effectively random. By sticking to the pattern, you ensure that no features catch your eye and cause you to pick them up next.

After we pick up stacks of tiles like this, we (that is, Gamer Bling) randomly place them in the tower, and we (that is, the whole family) are ready for the next game!

Some of my friends often find themselves building a single huge city which they spend the whole game trying to complete. That usually happens because they refuse to start new cities before finishing one that is already in progress. What is bad in that? Well, if you put most of your efforts in only one huge city (or two), you are most likely forgetting to use that tile to complete a cloister, a road or even scoring points in farms. Remember that farms get you 3 points for each complete city? So if you spent the entire game building ONE city, your farmer was pretty much useless.

Try building more cities of small sizes. Remember to check how many tiles you need to complete a city and don’t place any tile that may increase that number. For example, if you have a city that needs one tile to be completed and draws a city tile that will leave your city with two sides open, start a new city and wait for the right draw to complete the first.

REMEMBER: don’t start new cities in the opponents’ farms or you will give them points for free!

Carcassonne is a great game for young kids, playable as young as 3. But sometimes kids don’t know their own limits, like when they insist on playing ALL THE TILES despite getting fidgety and irritable.

Solution: take only half the tiles from the box at the beginning of the game and add more 1 ater if everything is going smoothly.

My kids LOVE Carcassonne. However, the Carcassonne experience can be a little bit messy with little ones, as they tend to bump and jostle more than adults.

Rather than putting tile piles around the table and having little hands reach over the board, what I have found very useful is to put all the stacks in front of me and number them. Then I have the kids tell me the pile number they want their tile from and I hand it to them.

This change in layout has lent to a much more cohesive board time and again.

Keep an eye on how many tiles are left to be drawn, know approximately how many rounds you have left. As you get closer to the end, don’t hesitate to place your meeples on any tile to score points, especially when the number of rounds you have left is equal to the number of meeples you have left + anticipate getting back. Try to acquire the quick points such as a finishing road piece or finishing castle piece.

If you’re not paying attention to this, you’ll find yourself at the end of the game with meeples left over, which don’t score you any points.