Rio Grande Games is an importer of European board games. With the entire board game output of Europe to pick from, you'd expect them to bring over some of the best that the continent has to offer ... and Carcassonne doesn't disappoint.
It's deceptively simple: you lay down square tiles to form cities, roads, and fields. But, it's also fiendishly complex, as you must balance building your own strategies against trying to hinder your opponents.
This game was originally produced Hans im Gluck in Germany.
Players: 2-5
Age: 10
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Difficulty: 1-2 (of 7)
The Components
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Followers and tiles in a simple start up.
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Carcassonne comes with a small set of very high quality components, including:
- 72 land tiles
- 12 river tiles
- 8 followers each in 5 different colors
- 1 scoring track
- 1 rule booklet
The land tiles are solid 4-color printing on very heavy card board. The drawings are attractive, appropriate to the Medieval period that the game evokes, and fit together flawlessly. The river tiles are identical to the land tiles, but with a river running through them; they were originally given away as part of a free "river expansion" to Carcassonne.
The scoring board is the size of the box, but otherwise identical in quality and manufacture to the land tiles. The numbers on the scoring board (0-49) each have a very thin border around them, that is sometimes broken--which made them hard to read for one of our players in one of the games of Carcassonne I've played.
The rules are 4-color on flimsy, though glossy paper. They use lots of pictures in their 4 pages and thus do a very good job of graphically explaining the game.
Finally the followers are made out of colored wood. They're well shaped and all around attractive.
My only real complaint regarding the components is that there isn't any bag or similar object to draw the land tiles out of; we're usually forced to hold the box with all the tiles above our head and draw.
Overall, the components of Carcassonne are very nice and a pleasure to play with. They exceed my expectations for a $20 game by a fair amount, and thus earn the game a "5" rating in style.
The Game Play
Game play begins with the placing of a special starting piece which includes a corner of a city and a straight road segment.
After that each turn a player does the following:
- Draws and places a land tile.
- Chooses whether to place a follower on his new land tile.
- Scores any points earned for completing cloisters, road, or cities.
The whole game is that simple. Here's a slightly better explanation of those three steps.
Placing Land Tiles: These are the heart of the game. Each tile has some combination of cities, roads, and cloisters on them. Pieces of cities connect to pieces of cities on other tiles; pieces of roads connect to other pieces of roads. Cloisters are singular buildings which sit in the middle of a tile. Fields take up the rest of tiles.
Since the game is all about connecting tiles together, it's relevent what is on the edges of a tile. On each edge you'll either find: a full-length city; one road; or a field. Thus, when you select a tile, you simply look at the four edges and then consult the existing board to see where you can legally place it.
Because there are only these three variables, there's almost always a legal placement of a tile. In the three games of Carcassonne that I've played we've only once drawn a tile which could not be legally placed (in which case, according to the rules, it was set aside).
Placing Followers: Each player has 8 followers. One of those is put on the scoring board to keep track of points, and thus each player has 7 more avialable to place on the board. Every turn, after you place a land tile, you can choose to place a follower on that tile. There are four places that followers may be placed: in a city; on a road; in a field; or in a cloister.
There's one gotcha: you can't place a follower in a city/road/field/cloister which already contains a follower. Thus, for example, if there's a city on the board, and you place a new piece with a city side adjoining that existing city, you can only place a follower in the city portion of your tile if there isn't a follower in the rest of that city already.
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Blue, black, and green: building toward one city?
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At the end of each turn, points are scored for any structures which have been "completed". The structures that can be completed are:
- Cities. Completed if all edges of the city are closed off.
- Cloisters. Completed if all 8 tiles surrounding the cloister are placed.
- Roads. Completed if each end of the road connects to a crossing, city, or cloister or if the road forms a closed loop.
There is no way to complete fields in game; they're all scored at the end game.
The clever reader will note it may be possible to end up with a structure with more than one follower in it. This happens if two existing cities/roads/fields are connected together after a follower had already been placed in each of the originally distinct structures. If the number of followers in a structure is tied upon scoring, each player earns all the points; if one player has more followers, only he receives the points.
It's important to complete cities, roads, and cloisters for two reasons: first, you get to take your follower back into your hand, which is vital because you have many less followers than turns in a game. Second, closed cities earn more than open cities, as noted below.
End Game: The game ends when all the tiles have been placed. At this point all uncompleted roads, cities, and cloisters are scored. Cities score less if they're incomplete, but the other two types do not.
Finally, we come to the fields. Inevitably lots of fields have ended up with multiple followers as the game has expanded. These are weeded out to discover who's in control of each field. The follower in control of a field earns points for each completed city he's adjacent too.
Here's a chart of all the point scoring:
| Structure |
Follower |
Completed |
Incomplete |
| City |
"Knight" |
2/tile +
2/pennant |
1/tile +
1/pennant |
| Road |
"Thief" |
1/tile |
1/tile |
| Cloister |
"Monk" |
1 +
1/tile |
1 +
1/tile |
| Field |
"Farmer" |
N/A |
4/completed
city adjoining |
A few notes before I close up: some city tiles have special pennant icons, which increase their value, as noted. In addition, each follower has a name depending on where you place it, as also noted, but this is solely used for color.
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Starting with the river.
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The River Expansion
This game also includes a 12-tile expansion which was originally a free giveaway. The 12 new tiles detail a river, and are placed first thing--starting with the beginning of the river, then randomly going through the 10 middle tiles, then ending with the end of the river.
Each tile is placed one by one, and each time the player who placed the tile can choose to play a follower, as normal. Some of the various river tiles have cities, roads, or both. The river itself doesn't have any effect, except to act as another divider of fields.
Overall, it's just a colorful way to add some variety to your game.
Rules Changes
Go ahead and skip this section if you haven't played the game, as it might appear to be Greek. The short summary is this: the producers of Carcassonne have done a great job of simplifying bad rules that appeared in the original edition of the game.
The German site for Carcassonne lists two rules changes which postdate the Rio Grande printing of the game. The simplify the game play and are very intuitive--in fact, they may be the way you're playing the game already. They are:
- City Size. Two-segment completed cities score the regular 4 points. (According to the first edition of the rules, these should only score half the normal, or two points.)
- Farming Scoring. A city can be scored multiply times by farmers, if there are multiple farmers in seperate fields, which each adjoin the city. (According to the first edition of the rules, you actually calculated each city separately based on the numbers of farmers adjoining it, rather than calculating each field separately; the new rule is much simpler.)
The Game Design
Overall, the game design of Carcassonne is superb. The game draws you in from your first tile placement and remains fun to the end, even if you're running behind--because building the lands of Carcassonne is fun in and of itself.
Here's some of the best game design elements:
Multiple Strategies: After three games, I'm still not sure of the best strategies. You can try and get cheap points every turn by instantly closing stuff off; or you can build cities, roads, and cloisters toward completion; or you try and get the best field positions for end game scoring. If you do cooperate with others, you have to carefully judge who you're cooperating with, and try not to cooperate with the same person too often, lest you two end up tied; cooperating with a bunch of different people on different strategies is much more personally beneficial. If anything there's too much potential for strategy in Carcassonne, which can bog things down if you have members of your gaming group who tend to play board games slowly.
All Players Always Thinking: In most strategy games yoy take your turn, try and make your best guess at what you're going to do next, then wait impatiently for your turn to come around again. However, in Carcassonne, each player's draw is visible because he's going to immediately play it. Thus, this encourages every player to look at every tile and think about where it should be placed. Our games are usually full of advice about where to place each and every piece, and thus it always feels like it's your turn.
Cooperation is Encouraged: I play strategy games for the competition, but I always believe that being encouraged to cooperate with one or two other players greatly increases the fun of a game, because you have a whole new level of social interactivity. Carcassonne encourages this exact type of play. If you can work together with someone else to build a city (e.g., they place a city piece with one follower, and then you place a city piece with one follower, very nearby, so that the cities could connect), then you'll both score many more points. One of the playtest games we played was very notable for how much it encouraged cooperation--out of 5 players the two best cooperators came in first and second, and the two worst competitors (which included me) came in fourth and fifth.
Competition is Allowed: There still are ways to solidly and definitively hurt another player by putting a tile down in such a way to block their city/road, take over their city/field with stronger follower numbers, etc. It just has to be done carefully.
Good with Many Player Numbers: I've played Carcassonne mostly with the maximum number of players. However, the gameplay dynamics are such that I can see you could drop down to the minimum number of players (2) and still have it work very nicely. For that matter, I'm sure you could come up with a nice solitaire variant. Also, it would be very easy to add additional players, probably up to 7 or 8, without ruining the game. You'd just need to get a set of 8 unique counters for each new player--coins, Settlers of Catan pieces, whatever.
Good for Late Comers: A late comer can just start playing if you're in the first third of the game or so. It doesn't throw off the balance because of the way the gameplay is structured, though he'll have a lower chance to win.
Randomness is Well Controlled: The variance each turn is very high, because you draw one of 72 different pieces. However, it's well controlled because a player can always benefit from just about any tile he draws in some way. Didn't draw a piece to expand your city? Then add that piece on to one of your roads, or use it to connect your field with a city complex or help encircle your cloister. The aspect of game design works because you can have up to 7 followers out there on the board, and thus be simultaneously working toward several goals.
Here's some of the few flaws:
Unbalanced Tile: Although other players disagree, I personally feel that the "Cloister" tile is unbalanced. Whenever you draw it, you have a guaranteed 5-9 points without doing much work. You put it down, you place a follower, and then you forget about it until you start needing followers back. I think it's a decent advantage to draw a cloister, and with only 6 total that's not going to average out unless you're playing a 2- or maybe 3-player game. In a game where randomness does play a large factor, having one card that can be randomly drawn and is better than the others is a bad idea.
Tough Pattern Matching: For some reason about 1 out of 5 players I've played with have a tough time doing the visual pattern matching required for the game--understanding what road/city connection will need to be made if a tile is in different orientations. This didn't adversely affect any of our games, but seemed like a potential problem in the making.
Cool Web Sites
Here's a few web sites related to Carcassonne that are cool:
Conclusion
If you've looked down at Carcassonne because it's a very short game, don't. I actually found it very refreshing to find a very strategically complex game that could be played in such a short time. The superb components and low price point combine to make this one of the best games you could buy if you have a spare twenty-spot sitting around.
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