Board Game Review: Carcassonne

I'm going to come right out and say it: my friends and I play Carcassonne as a raucous party game. Besides just playing to improve your own score, there are myriad opportunities to work with other players, or to try to screw other players over.

The strategic trick is knowing when to fly solo, when to partner, and when to screw, a task not made any easier by loads of wine.

COMPONENTS
72 tiles that represent bits of land in the medieval French countryside. They are illustrated with bits of roads, cities, abbeys, and farms. There are also 12 tiles that represent a river, which was once an expansion to Carcassonne and is now included with the basic game. You get 40 pawns, colloquially called "meeples," which come in 5 different colors. A scoring track is also included.

The tiles are sturdy, thick cardboard, with a linen finish that stands up to repeated play. The artwork is high quality and evokes a warm, homey feel. The meeples are people-shaped chunks of wood that are great fun to play with when not in play - they can be stacked up into little human pyramids and the like.

SETUP
The river tiles are set aside. The 72 land tiles are placed in the provided drawstring bag. Each player gets 7 meeples in their chosen color. The 8th meeple is used on the scoring track. A good-sized open area is recommended to play on. Clear off a table and you should be fine.

PLAY
Each person takes a turn drawing and then placing a tile. In the beginning, this is done with the river tiles. The river tiles are just a way to get a "board" set up to play off of, and solves some small gameplay imbalances that exist when beginning with land tiles. Once the 12 river tiles are placed, play continues by drawing 1 tile from the bag and placing it next to another tile of your choice so that the touching side or sides match.

Each tile will picture a fragment of one or more of the following: road, abbey, city, or farm. When you place a tile, you have the option to place a meeple on it, claiming the road, abbey, city, or farm. That meeple then remains on the tile until that land type is scored.

SCORING
Roads, abbeys, and cities are scored throughout the game as they are completed. Once the land type is scored, the meeple is returned to the player. Some road tiles have crossings marked on them, and signify the beginning or end of a road. Once a road has a crossing on both ends, each tile of the road is scored at 1 point apiece. An abbey is complete once it is fully surrounded by tiles, forming a 3 x 3 grid of 9 tiles total. The player with a meeple on the abbey scores 9 points. Cities are a bit more complicated. Each tile of the city scores 1 point apiece, but some city tiles have a pennant on them: these tiles score 2 points apiece. Farms are the most complicated of all. They're claimed by placing a meeple on the grassy area of a tile, and they aren't scored until the end of the game because their worth depends on the number of completed cities the grassy area is contiguous with (how many it "touches").

STRATEGY
Ideally, you don't want all of your meeples tied up on the board at one time: what if you draw that perfect tile on your next turn that would earn you several points if you placed a meeple on it? Holding 1 or 2 in reserve as much as possible is good basic strategy.

Only one meeple can claim any road, abbey, city, or farm. However, it's possible to "horn in" on another's territory. Say you've drawn a city tile, and there is a city already begun by someone on the board. If you place the tile contiguous to the city, you're only helping your opponent as you can't place a meeple on it. However, you can gamble and place your tile NEAR their city, but not touching it, place your meeple on "your" city, and hope to link them up in future terms. At that point, both of you have a vested interest in completing the city and voila - you've recruited a partner to help you out.

The same can be done with roads and farms, though with roads it's not very profitable, and with farms it's very difficult to pull off. The last game of Carcassonne I played, one of us did it: he horned in on someone else's farm on the very last turn, wresting control of several cities from the other farmer and causing a ruckus, to put it mildly.

Roads can be used for quick scoring. If you place a road tile that completes an unclaimed stretch of road and you have a spare meeple, you can put your meeple on it, score it immediately, and get your meeple back, all in the same turn.

In sum, there are several strategic options in Carcassonne, and the game can be played independently and cooperatively, or, if you're my friends, cutthroat as pirates!

SUMMARY
Carcassonne is often mislabeled as a light game. It's simple to learn and plays quickly, but there is a potential for strategic depth that's often missed. In my opinion, it's the best of both worlds: what could be more perfect than a game that easy to teach but isn't boring?

Thanks to Carcassonne's popularity, several expansions are available, which offer more scoring options, more meeples (you can get up to 7 or so players going with the extra meeples included in some expansions), and more strategy. Inns and Cathedrals and Traders and Builders are considered the best of the expansions.

OVERALL RATING
5/5. The only negative is the complexity of farmer scoring, which can be difficult to grasp.

Price: around $16 at online retailers, about $25 retail. Available at many Toys 'R' Us, Target, or Barnes & Noble locations.

Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Publisher: Rio Grande Games