Board Game Analysis #2 – Carcassonne

Following up the last board game analysis, here is the award-winning Carcassonne that was made by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede.

Carcassonne is a socially competitive game where you create your own playing field. Each turn you will get a piece that you can expand the map with. By using your followers the goal is to take control of territory that will grant you points towards the end game standings.

The game can be played with two to five players and is recommended for players at the age of eight or older. The main audience for the game are the creative people and tacticians, due to the map being built by the players and the amount of thinking ahead that is needed to know what would give the most points.

Overview of the game with the river-expansion

How the game works

In the setup of the game each player gets eight followers, whereas one will be used as a score counter on a separate board. A starting piece will be placed on the table that the rest of the map will emerge from. Each turn the player gets to pick one random piece of the map and can place it wherever it fits. Similar to a picture puzzle the piece needs to have proper connections to the adjacent pieces, so if there is a road to the top, there also needs to be a road that connects to it on the new piece. Although the game contains a lot of different combinations, it is possible to make a spot unplayable (which also can be used as a tactic).

A player can choose to place one of their seven followers on the piece that they placed during this turn, this will take control of the area that they were placed in. A follower can be placed on one of four different spots:

• Cities (knights): A completed city gives two points for each tile included in the completion of it. City-pieces with pennants on them give two extra points. If the cities aren’t completed at the end of the game, the player in control of them will gain half the points instead. A two-tile city is an exception and only gives two points when completed.
• Roads (thieves): A road gives one point for each tile included. A road is finished when it ends in either a cloister, a city or a crossroad. Roads can come in several different versions (straights, turns, three-way crossroad and four-way crossroad with different variations with the cloisters and cities).
• Cloisters (monks): Cloisters can give up to nine points; one for the cloisters and one for each tile around it. A cloister is completed when all eight pieces around it is filled out.
• Farms (farmers): Farmers can be placed on any grass-field and will be stuck there until the end of the game. Farms give points for each completed city that borders it. Farms reaches as long as the grass does without getting surrounded by roads or cities. So if you are lucky one farmer can cover the entire playing field, and if you are unlucky, you can get stuck inside a road-ring with a follower that can’t give any points at all for the rest of the game.

With the exception of farmers, all of these followers can be returned to the player once their area has been completed.

A player cannot place a follower in an occupied area. If your part that you just placed is connected to another part (e.g. you continue building on a road) you may not place a follower if there already is one placed there, including your own followers. Only the player that have control over something by having the most followers there (or is tied for the control) gets the points for it. Since players can’t place followers on attached parts, you can place a piece further away and then connect them later on to invade someone else’s property and preferably take control over the area. If a player runs out of followers, he or she may continue placing pieces of the map until they can play normally by getting back one of their followers through completing one of their followers’ tasks.

Overview with the scoring board

Strong points of the game

Carcassonne is really similar to your everyday picture puzzle, and for a good reason. A lot of the time when we played, it seemed like everyone had just as fun (if not more) just trying to create a beautiful map. This could both be good and bad, but let’s say that it is good for now. The map is impressively well made and not only is fun just to mess around with, but also creates some critical moments in how you are going to play. “Should I try to lock out the farmers from this part of the map, or should I focus on more points? Or maybe trying to take over that area completely with my farmers instead?”. There seems to be just enough combinations of tiles to create tension in certain heavily populated areas while still keeping enough options to clear out the mess with the perfect piece. In one of the games we played I tried to keep a farmer that was in one end of the map from getting connected to the other half of the map by using roads. Almost at the end he got a cloister + road-piece that suited perfectly for letting the farmer get a connection to the whole map, which meant that I lost since I didn’t have enough farmers to get the points for all the cities.

The game also works as a social game, although manipulatively and chaotic. There is a rule that the player who is going to place a piece must show it to everyone when picked up, this way everyone can have a chance to give their opinion on what the player should do (whether they like it or not). This leaves room for some manipulative tactics, like reminding the player of all possible places to put the piece except for the most rewarding one.

The game is also easy to get into and is often seen by the community as a good starter game to other more advanced games due to its simplicity. There are only a couple of rules you need to know to start playing the game. When we first tried the game it only took a couple of turns before we knew pretty well what we were doing and could start focusing on tactics. By the third round we were coming up with advanced tactics on how we half a game forward would mess up a certain player or gain a big advantage, even with the game being as randomized as it is.

Highlight of the game

Although the half-randomly generated map was a strong contender, the highlight is the balance between early and late-game points. During the five or so games that we played before making this analysis, I couldn’t get a clear grip on what was best; farms or getting points during the game. The conclusion I came up with was that it is balanced well enough to be purely situational. Farmers are all about the risk-taking, they could be the winning-move, but they could also prove to be a hindrance through the game without any reward if you are not careful. It is a fine balance between stopping someone from getting too many early points and stopping someone from getting too many end game points, while at the same time the farmers is relying on as many cities being created and completed as possible.

The random order of the tiles creates a lot of replay value as well. Since the whole playing field may look completely different from one game to another, you never really know what your tactic should be during the game or what the end-result will be. The cities are most likely where a lot of first-timers will place their focus and the farms are directly affected by these, but the roads and cloisters are not to be underestimated during the game.

Weak points of the game

Overall I find the game to be solid, but there are a couple of small things that I appreciate a bit less, although they are nothing that can not be fixed with some patience.

• Keeping check of how many points you currently have with farmers and similar can get pretty overwhelming and confusing at times and players often tried to put down their followers where they couldn’t because of this.
• When playing with four to five players the discussion can get a little too overwhelming and I had to stop and ask how many that actually tried to win the game and not just tried to make a pretty map. This mostly depends on who you are playing with, but I felt like it was a common thing when we were that many.
• I don’t personally have anything against the “luck of the draw”, but my companions felt that it could get a little too unfair sometimes with the random tiles.

Summary

Overall, Carcassonne is a well thought out board game that brings out the creative person in you, while it still keeps the strategic thinking high. The game has a high replay value and will keep you coming back for more with the intent of finding the best tactic and the most organized map, all this while having a good time with your friends discussing where you could place your pieces to create that beautiful, medieval, highway or where you shouldn’t place them to mess with the leading player.