Boardgame Analysis: Carcasonne

As a school task our group was supposed to play and analyze a board game free of choice. We picked Carcasonne: A game with medieval setting in which you are supposed to build castles and roads together with your friends, but claim as much of it as you can as your own to get the highest score.

In Carcasonne two to five players are recommended, and also preferably a completely flat square meter to play it on.

There are two different types of objects in the game. The cards:

(The bottom row of cards are actually from the river expansion, and does not come with the original game. But we had access to it and tried it twice. However I will not cover its rules here.)

And the followers. A follower is represented by a tiny wooden man. Each player gets a couple of followers.

To start playing you first have to give all the players their  followers, shuffle the cards and place them face down in a circle around the designated playing area. All cards except one: The starting card. It has a different backside than the others and is therefore easy to recognize. That card is placed face up in the middle of the playing area. Then the game starts and the youngest player then decides who goes first, whereupon the player turns goes clockwise.

At the start of a turn the player picks a card. He then has to place it somewhere it fits. If you take a look at the pictures of the cards previous in the post you can see that some have brown parts (castle parts). The sides of the squares that are completely brown can only connect to other sides that are completely brown. The same goes for the green ones, and the roads can only be connected to other roads. A card must always be placed with connection to something. It can’t be placed out in the void!

When the player has decided where to put its card he can also choose if he wants to place a follower. But only on that specific card he just placed!

If you place a follower on a road it becomes a bandit. When the road is completed you will get your follower back and earn as many points as the amount of cards the road covers. A road begins/ends with crossroads, castles or cloisters. If you do not get to complete your road during the game you will still get the amount of points that the road is long when the game ends.

There are however some more rules when it comes to placing bandits; it cannot be placed on a road that already has bandits. If two roads that both have bandits belonging to different players were to connect however, they would share the points of the road when it is completed. If one of the players had more bandits on the road than the other player he would get all the points.

If a follower is placed within castle walls he becomes a citizen. If the castle is completed you while you have a citizen inside it you will have it back and gain two points for each card there’s a piece of the castle in (except for some castle pieces which grant four points instead, those are marked with blue and white shields). If the game ends and the castle is not completed you will only get one point for every card that has a piece of the castle in it (except for the ones with shields on; they will grant two points).

When it comes to the rules about when you can place a citizen in a castle they are basically the same as for when you can place a bandit on a road. There can’t be any other citizen in the same castle, and if two castles with different players’ citizens in merge, the points of the castle are split. If one player has more citizens they get all the points.

If a follower is placed on grass they become farmers. Farmers stay on the ground until the game is completed, and when it is you count how many completed castles there are on all the grass the farmers are connected to. Each completed caste grants 3 points.

The rules behind placing farmers are the same as the rules for citizens and bandits. There can’t be more than one farmer on one field of grass, and if two fields with farmers on are connected they split the points. If there are more of one player’s farmers then they will have all the points.

And then, as a final, we have monks. If a follower is placed in a cloister it becomes a monk. There can be only one monk per cloister. If all eight tiles around the cloister card are occupied by another card the cloister will be completed and award the owner of the monk with nine points. The player will then also have the monk back. If the cloister is not completed during the game, the player will gain points equal to the number of cards within the eight tiles around it plus one for the cloister itself.

One of the best parts of this game is that it is easy to pick up and play with a couple of friends. It is a very social game and our group constantly talked to each other about different ways to place the cards to gain the most of them (or how to destroy the most for other players with them). It is a game that requires a lot of strategic thinking, and if you wanted to, you could go really deep into it and really think about every move you do and every possible move others could do. Not to mention the psychology and the human element. Sometimes you might be able to help yourself more if you help another player; favors for favors, or you might make enemies eager for revenge if you do something mean to someone. This is however nothing you have to worry about as a new player. The random element of picking the cards makes it possible for everyone to have a chance at winning in this game. Which is something good, but it is also what I think is a flaw in this game.

The fact that you only get one single card that is completely random every time it’s your turn when you play with four others is really annoying. A road is not a fun piece to get, and if you manage to get three of them in a row you do not really feel like playing anymore; especially not when the other players think for a really long time before making their moves. Of course this can be a fun thing at some times, when you feel really lucky. But for my part I mostly just sat there, picking up pieces of roads while the other players got all the cards I wanted. I would like to try this game with a different rule about picking cards – Instead of picking up just one card every turn you get to pick up three cards each turn. You then choose one of those three to play and put back the others. It would be fun to try!

The greatest advantage the players who had played this before had was possibly their knowledge of the cards. They knew what kind of pieces there were and how many of them there were. That led to a point when they knew that some castles could not be finished because all of those pieces had been used and similar situations. If this is not wanted, you could play with a lot more cards. Say three decks. But only for a certain amount of rounds, so that the game won’t take forever.

I think that the most interesting part of this game is that it works as a map generator. Every rule of it encourages the players to finish cities, roads and plains. The random element also makes every game different from the other. When a game is finished you have more to look upon than the scoreboard. You have made a city together, with perhaps a huge castle in, or a couple of roads that just goes in circles leading to nowhere from nowhere, or a bunch of cloisters tucked together.

When it comes to the target audience I would say that it is pretty wide. On the box of the game it says that it is recommended to be older than eight years, but I think you have to be a little bit older to really appreciate it. Strategists and will like this game, but it is not so hardcore that it will scare away more relaxed players who just want to have some fun and build some cities. I think that the setting of the game; its greyish medieval theme with knights and castles, might be more attractive to the boys than the girls of today, especially boys interested in fantasy books and fantasy movies, and possibly even more attractive to those who like to come up with stories and draw maps on their own.

This is a well-made game. It has random elements to increase its replay value; it has a lot of strategic depth, and also a touch of creativity. I think that the setting of this game is spot on. The medieval theme with castles and roads and bandits and citizens works extremely well with the core mechanincs.

Very good bye!