Players: 2
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
This game was simultaneously produced by Hans im Gluck in Germany.
Though this game is closely related to the other Carcassonnes, I've written this review largely from scratch, because of the differences in gameplay. I suggest reading through the entire piece, even if you're very familiar with the other Carcassonne games. There are major differences in tile placement and in scoring.
The Components
Carcassonne: The Castle comes with:
- 1 castle wall
- 60 castle tiles
- 18 wall tiles
- 16 wooden figures
- 1 rule book
Castle Wall: The castle wall is actually made up of a bunch of wall segments which all fit together via jigsaw connections which keep them well connected during gameplay. Together they form a very irregular castle wall, with lots of weird ins and outs. The wall serves four different purposes: it acts as a scoretrack; it holds the wall tiles; it forms the borders for the game; and it provides start spots for the game.
The castle wall, the castle tiles, and the wall tiles are all printed in full color on solid, linen-textured cardboard.
Castle Tiles: These square tiles each feature parts of one or more of four terrains: green courts, red houses, grey towers, and paths. Some of the courts also include tents upon them and some of the paths include fountains. The shapes are very square, with the courts, houses, and towers each taking up exactly one, two, three, or four quarters of their tiles, and the roads running down the middles. As a result, everything looks a bit abstract, and not as beautiful as most of the other Carcassonne games.
Wall Tiles:These smaller square tiles are placed on the corners of the wall. There are two each of nine different tiles. Each one features an icon demonstrating what the tile does. They’re a bit arcane through the first game or three, but afterward it’ll be fairly immediately obvious what they do.
Wood Bits: Each of the two colors (dark and light brown) has 7 followers and 1 keep. The followers are elegant little men (different from the original Carcassonne pieces) while the keeps are abstract little pinnacles. Or pen nubs. Or something. They both look very classy, and are easy to distinguish between.
Rule Book: The rulebook is a 6-page full-color, glossy explanation of the game, filled with examples. Unfortunately it also misses out on some key questions and answers for a few specific issues in the game (having to do with the placement of roads and the order of scoring, both of which are correctly explained in this review, and with the timing of playing certain wall tiles together, which I’m still not sure about).
Box & Tray: The box is the exact same size as all the other Carcassonne game. It's smallish and has a tray that creates a nice row for all the tiles to go in and another that you can drop the wood bits in. The jigsaw wall pieces don't fit into the box very elegantly, but they do fit if you stack carefully.
Like its predecessors, Carcassonne: The Castle is a very nice game with very nice components. However it's lost both some of the beauty and some of the elgance of its components: the former because of the geometric rigidity of the pieces and the second because of the increased complexity of the wall tiles, which aren't immediately intuitive to first time players.
Nonetheless, Carcassonne: The Castle is still above average and thus earns a "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The goal in Carcassonne: The Castle is, as with all the Carcassonne games, to score points by completing various land terrains where you have placed followers. In this case you'll be scoring houses, towers, paths, and courts.
Setup: To setup Carcassonne: The Castle you must first connect up the wall to form your scoretrack and game border. There will be 14 corners on the wall. Onto each of these other than the "0/1" space you play, face-down, a wall tile; these will be earned by players during scoring. The remaining 5 wall tiles are put away. Then each player places one of his followers on the "0" space to mark his starting score.
Order of Play: Each turn each player takes the following actions in order:
- Draw and place a castle tile.
- Choose whether to place a follower on the new castle tile.
- Score any points earned for completing houses, towers, or paths.
Draw and Place a Castle Tile: Each of the castle tiles has up to four terrains on it. Paths cut through the middles of the tiles; they can exit the tile on one, two, three, or four edges. Houses (red), towers (gray), and courts (green) each fill either one, two, three, or four quarters of the tile (sometimes with paths running between them, sometimes not). Some fields can also have markets drawn in them and some paths have fountains on them.
Each turn a player draws a new castle tile, then places it. He may either place it orthagonally adjacent to a tile that has already been placed or he may place it next to one of the "start spaces"--these are little half tiles built into the walls; there are seven total. Clearly, the first tile of the game must be placed next one of these start spaces.
There's one other rule for placement: paths must match up to any start space or tile which your new tile is placed next to: the path must continue from the adjacent tile/space, not just abruptly end. There's an exception to this: roads can run into the castle walls (e.g., the edges of the board), other than those start spaces.
Houses, towers, and courts need not match to adjacent tiles. (This is a change from the normal Carcassonne gameplay.) In fact, this tends to be how you close off those terrains--through the placement of unlike terrains adjacent.
Choose Whether to Place a Follower: Next you choose whether to place a follower on the tile you just placed. You can choose to place a follower on any of the terrains of that tile--paths, towers, houses, or courts--provided that there isn't already a follower in the same terrain of connected tiles. In other words, if you the tile you placed included a tower segment, and that connected to a tower segment on an adjacent tile which already had a follower, you couldn't place one in the tower of your tile.
(Despite all that, multiple followers can end up in the same terrain through clever placement involving connecting together two formerly discrete terrains each of which already had a follower, with an intermediary tile.)
Score Any Points: Houses, towers, and roads can all be "completed". This means that they're immediately scored and all the followers on the terrain are returned to their owners. Here's how:
- Houses. Completed if all orthagonal edges of the house are cut off, leaving no room for expansion. (This could be thanks to paths, the castle wall, or other terrains; sometimes the other terrains will be on the same tile, sometimes on a tile placed adjacent.)
- Paths. Completed if all the edges of the path end in squares or the castle wall or if closed loops are formed. (One notable thing about paths: they can branch, possibly giving you more than two ends to close.)
- Towers. Just as with houses, they're completed if the orthagonal edges of the tower are all blocked.
Note that courts are not on this list. Even if they're technically closed by being blocked on all edges, they're never scored in-game and the followers never come back.
Once a terrain is completed, it's scored. Each segment of the terrain is worth 1 or 2 points, as mentioned in the scoring chart in the End Game section. (Or, in rare cases, 4 points, if the appropriate wall tile is had.) The entire score goes to the player with the most followers in the terrain; if there is a tie, no one gets the points.
Houses & Keeps. If the terrain you scored was a house, and it was your first house you place your keep marker on it. If it was a later house, and it's larger than the house currently marked with your keep, you move your keep. This marker is really just a simple reminder of who has the biggest house. It'll be used in the End Game scoring.
Wall Tiles. As has already been mentioned, there are 13 wall tiles on the scoring path. They're located at turns in the wall which are at specific points on the track: 12/13, 16/17, 20/21, 26/27, 32/33, 38/39, 42/43, 56/57, 64/65, 66/67, 82/83, 88/89, and 90/91. If, by scoring a terrain, you end up exactly on one of these spots that still has a tile you claim the face-down wall tile, and immediately turn it face-up and place it next to you. (Note that this only happens during the game proper; any scoring during the end game don't result in wall tiles being awarded.)
There are 18 tiles, 2 each of 9 types. Three can be used during the regular game:
- Take an extra turn.
- Multiply the value of a completed tower by 2.
- Multiply the value of a completed house by 2.
Six can be used during the end game:
- Score a path.
- Score a tower.
- Score a house.
- Score a courtyard at 4 points per market.
- Enlarge keep by 2.
- Score +5 points.
Multiple Scoring. if multiple terrains are all scored at the same time, the person who completed them scores them one at a time in an order of his choosing. This might allow him to deny a wall tile to an opponent, or to earn several wall tiles himself by going in the proper order.
End Game: The game ends when all tiles have been placed.
At this point the players may score any incomplete paths, towers, or houses for which they have wall tiles letting them do so. When the players have used up any such tiles, the rest of the followers on the paths, towers, or houses are removed.
Next, the players score any courts which they have followers in. Each court is worth 3 points per market contained within (or 4 with the appropriate wall tile).
Finally players look at who has the largest keep, possibly modified by the +2 keep wall tile. The player who wins this contest gets to score the largest contiguous empty space in the castle. (This usually awards 5-10 bonus points, depending on how adroit the player with the smaller keep was at separating empty spaces, to deny his opponent the points.)
Here's how scoring usually works:
| Follower | Completed | Incomplete | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Court | Merchant | N/A | 3/market |
| House | Squire | 1/tile | N/A |
| Path | Herald | 1/tile | N/A |
| w/Fountain | Herald | 2/tile | N/A |
| Tower | Knight | 2/tile | N/A |
| Empty Space | Largest Keep | N/A | 1/contiguous space |
In actuality, the wall tiles can add some variability to the score, which is noted here in an expanded chart, for completeness sake:
| Follower | Completed | Incomplete | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Court | Merchant | N/A | 3/market |
| w/tile #7 | Merchant | N/A | 4/market |
| House | Squire | 1/tile | w/tile #6 |
| w/tile #3 | Squire | 2/tile | N/A |
| Path | Herald | 1/tile | w/tile #4 |
| w/Fountain | Herald | 2/tile | w/tile #4 |
| Tower | Knight | 2/tile | w/tile #5 |
| w/tile #2 | Knight | 4/tile | N/A |
| Empty Space | Largest Keep | N/A | 1/contiguous space |
If that looks complex, it actually isn't. Usually scoring is the normal 1 or 2 points per tile laid out in the chart above; if a tile is involved, it's just one, and how it's used is very obvious and shown on the face of the tile.
When everything's been scored, the player with the most points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Klaus-Jurgen Wrede produced his original Carcassonne game back in 2000, and since he's subtly tweaked the gameplay in various ways to create innovative and different variations, that ultimately are just that: close variations of the original game.
In Carcassonne: The Castle popular German designer Reiner Knizia approached Carcassonne with a clearly different goal. He's dramatically modified the gameplay to create a much more strategic game that also works well for two players. (The original Carcassonne also works for two players, but it loses some of its cooperative elements and thus turns into a different, slightly weaker game.)
Here's the big changes from Carcassonne to the Castle:
- Tile placement rules are much less restrictive, allowing much more tactical placement every turn.
- Castle walls create an additional issue during tile placement.
- Wall tiles create incentive to score small terrains, creating an additional level of strategy where you must offset big vs. small terrains.
- Individual wall tiles can introduce new strategy and new goals for players depending on what's drawn (e.g., place in courts due to market tile, try and build a big tower due to x2 tower tile, use double turns to get into an opponent's terrain, etc).
- Lower value of houses contrasts with end game value of keep.
- Value of contiguous empty spaces at end creates another purpose in tile placement.
Overall, I think The Castle is the superior game for tactical, strategic, or two-player play, though that comes with the price of a higher level of abstraction than the other Carcassonne games.
The Game Design
Here's what The Castle does quite well:
Great Strategy & Tactics: As discussed just above, many elements of The Castle add to the strategic and tactical play in Carcassonne: The Castle. You have constant choice over a number of variables that can move you to victory. (The importance of strategy is, I think, clearly shown by the fact that both my average score and that of my partner has climbed in the dozen or so games I've played since I picked up the game in late December.)
Good Control of Randomness: Because you can play any tile any place, except for issues related to paths, your ability to fill in any gap in your terrain is dramatically increased. You just have to choose to trade off waiting a bit longer for a perfect piece versus playing something earlier. It's rare to have a space become impossible to play into, while in the original Carcassonne that was a major point of strategy.
The Castle also tends to feature many of the strengths of the original Carcassonne. It's simple, it's evocative (though less so because of the abstract geometric shapes), and it's fun.
My one caveat, not even a complaint is:
Possible to Play Very Badly: Because you have so much more freedom, you also have the freedom to really screw up. In some of my early games I played terribly by letting terrains get totally out of control to the point where they were almost non-closable, and that hurt me on both followers and earning wall tiles (and was very frustrating). This can be frustrating for other first-time players as well.
Overall, Carcassonne: The Castle is an excellent expansion of the already very good Carcassonne game design. It earns a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
if you like Carcassonne already, and want a two-player version that's very strategic, this is it. However, I also have no compunctions in suggesting it to any serious strategy player who wants a new two-player offering. Thanks to Reiner Knizia's design, this game is a lot less fluffier than the original, while still remaining quite fun.
