Game description

In Carcassonne 2-5 players create a land with cities, roads, cloisters and farmland. By drawing a tile and placing it adjacent to another tile you make your city bigger, your road longer and your farmland wider in order to gain more score and win the game. When a player has put down a tile they can place a follower on that tile. When a follower is placed at a land type they become a specific type of follower. A follower placed on a city becomes a knight, on a road it becomes a thief, a monk on a cloister and a farmer on a farmland. Each placed follower will make it possible for the player to gain score. Each terrain type (or follower, it depends how you see it) have a different scoring system. There are a lot of expansions made for the game, for example Hills and Sheep, South Seas and many others, most still have the medieval theme that the original game has. We played the original.

During the game players will strive to build and complete terrain types in order to gain score. Completed cities, roads and cloisters will give the player score during the game and farmland and uncompleted terrain types are added when the game is over.

The gameplay is very easy to understand. The player draws, matches their tile to another tile and decides whether or not to place a follower somewhere on their tile. The tile cannot be placed so that the terrain becomes interrupted; you have to make sure that the edge is interlaced with the edge on the other tile

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The player cannot place a follower on a terrain type that is connected to the same terrain where an opponent has a follower on another tile.

For example, the blue player cannot place his follower in the city because it is connected to another city tile that the red player has his follower in. The blue player can decide to put his follower on the farmland, as a farmer, instead or to not place any follower this turn. This rule apply even if it is the same player that place both followers.

Two followers can only share the same terrain type if they are connected after both followers are placed.

Core game system

The core game system of Carcassonne is the tile based board. Each tile has 1-3 types of terrain where the player can place its follower. It is the type of terrain that decides how much points the player will score and how they will get it. The four types of terrain are City, Road, Cloister and Farmland and this is how you score with them:

City – You get two points for every city tile in your completed city, if the tile has a pennant they are worth an additional two points. If the city is completed with only two tiles each tile is worth only one point. When the game is over the player get one point for each tile and one for each pennant in the city.

Road – For a completed road you get one point for each tile of the road. For uncompleted roads the player get one score for each tile at the end of the game.

If there is more than one follower in a city or on a road both players get the whole score. However if one player has more followers on the same terrain type than the others they get all the score.

Cloister – The player get one point for the cloister tile and then one point for every surrounding tile.

Farmland – In the end of the game players get four points for every completed city that are connected with their farmland. If more than one player has followers in the same farmland they both get four points unless one player has more followers than the others.

Since each tile can have 1 – 3 terrain types the tile the player draw will determine what action they can do. This makes it more difficult for the player to follow a set strategy and it makes the game more unpredictable. You may have a great plan but if you get a tile that don’t agree with your plan you will have to think of something else to do. And sometimes, because of the tiles, the only thing you can do may help your opponent which is a very interesting situation.

Most interesting system

To me the most interesting system is the core game system with the tiles. This is what sets the game apart from other board games. I really like how the players can control the environment and I see possibilities for different kinds of gameplay. For some players it is more important to create a nice looking map without holes or weirdly looking cities rather than winning the game. For others the winning is the most important part and they do everything to get the highest score. There are the ones that only want to sabotage and create difficult situations. Depending on whom you’re playing with and what they want from the game it can become totally different experiences.

The best and the worst

The best part of Carcassonne is the social interactions that the mechanics create. The control the player has during their turn will make them helpless on another players turn. This creates a great climate for sabotage and alliances. Since the sides of the land tile must match the adjacent tile it is easy to create difficult situations and make it hard for the opponent to complete their terrain type. Even though you do not want it you might have to work together with your opponent if your terrain becomes connected during the game, we noticed this mostly on cities since all the players in a completed city will get the score for that city it is a very lucrative act to join in on someone else’s city and complete it together.

I realise that I have put down the socialisation during the gaming as the best part of both the board games we’ve played during this course. I believe that this is what should be the best part in any board game since that is what you are looking for when you sit down and play a game with other people; social interaction.

The only thing I find bad about Carcassonne is that that the counting of the score in the end is a boring way to end an entertaining game session. During the game you are quite immersed and excited but then suddenly all land tiles are placed and then you have to count. I understand that it is impossible to count the score from the farmland during the game because things can change drastically as the board changes. But the way it is now sort of take away some of the joy in winning because it is not something you actively do but rather something than happens when you are already done and does not care anymore.

Target audience

The age restriction on the box marks Carcassonne as a game for players over the age of 10. I do agree with the restriction because the game can be a bit confusing at times. I think that unless a younger person is playing with an older person they will have a hard time. This thesis is also backed up by the existence of the game My first Carcassonne that is “adapted to allow players of all ages to play together”[1]  and is marketed for players over the age of 4.

Carcassonne is well suited for several types of players. As I said earlier I noticed three player styles, at least in my group, and those where the Creator who enjoy creating a well ordered and aesthetically pleasing city, the Winner that merely focus on winning the game by doing tactical decisions and the Saboteur that really likes to mess up other players plans by setting up difficult situations. But Carcassonne can also be a co-op game where the players join forces to create the land of Carcassonne. It reaches a wide target audience and I believe that most people will enjoy the diverse experience of the game. The game also have many different expansions as I mentioned in the instruction that can make the game the game even more diverse and that gives the player a hole bunch of new terrain types to create a more and more complex world. The fact that there are so many expansions available show just how popular the game is.

Summary

Overall Carcassonne is an entertaining and very social board game. The tile based board allows you to be creative and forces everybody to be active in the game, at all time. If you’re not trying to convince your opponent to place a tile at a specific place, or not place it, you are probably planning your next move that will lead you to victory if you get the right tile. It is a game suitable for most types of players and it creates a great way for those types of players to play together, something that not every game can do. The diversity of Carcassonne also makes it interesting to play even if you have played several times before and the first time player is just as likely to win as the experienced player.

That the game is popular is hard to miss by all the expansions that have been made. The fact is that when we sat in the library playing an older student passed by and when she saw what we were playing she came up to us just to tell us how much she loved the game.

[1] http://www.spelexperten.com/sallskapsspel/barnspel/my-first-carcassonne.html