Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 45-75 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
I'm borrowing some text describing the gameplay from some of my earlier Carcassonne reviews, but The City is unique in a number of ways, so you'll probably want to read straight through.
The Components
Carcassonne: The City comes with a set of beautiful components:
- 75 city tiles
- 1 scoring track
- City Wall Bits:
- 1 city gate
- 70 walls
- 2 short walls
- 12 towers
- 32 followers
- 2 cloth bags
- 1 rulebook
- 1 wooden box
City Tiles: The square tiles are all printed on extremely solid cardboard (thicker than any of the other Carcassonne games). Each tile depicts a mixture of residential areas, markets in three colors, public buildings, and historic buildings. Generally, I don't find the tiles as vibrant as many of the other Carcassonnes, as there's more muted brown and gray, but they are amazingly detailed and most tiles are quite unique. Look closely and you'll see little people wandering around the streets!
Scoring Track: A simple track numbered 1-50, with representative artwork from the tiles scattered across. Again, printed on very solid cardboard, like the tiles.
City Wall Bits: This is where the game really starts to shine, as the 85 wall bits are all made from high quality and very solid wood. There's a cute little city gate, 2 short wall tiles which can go next to it, another 70 wall tiles intended to go around the edges of the city, and finally 12 nicely cut turreted towers which go at city wall corners.
The city walls (and city gate), it should be noted, run along the edges of tiles and are cut just right to do so. All together, this is an amazing weight of wood, and it looks gorgeous when the game is laid out.
Followers: These 32 meeples are in the 4 player colors (blue, red, green, and yellow). They're mysteriously conehead meeples (though one player suggested they might be helmeted meeples). They're normal good German quality wood, though they don't look as great as all those unpainted city wall pieces.
Cloth Bags: Two plain cloth bags are included, one for tiles and one for wood pieces. You actually don't need any, as you have to draw tiles from piles, not a bag. Nonetheless, I kept one to store my tiles in, while the other went into my Carcassonne: The Castle game to store the tiles there.
Rulebook: A six-page full-color rulebook, well illustrated and printed on sturdier than usual paperstock. I felt like there were a couple of holes in the rules, and had a few questions on my first game, such as, When does the game end? (Only at the end of the wall building phase if the wall triggers the end.), and Do you get meeples back from closing terrain as soon as a wall closes that terrain? (Apparently yes, meaning you can use them later in the same wall building phase.) I've found the last couple of Carcassonne games (including The Castle and King & Scout) to have holes in their rules too, so it's a pity that was repeated here. However, for the majority of the game rules the rulebook did a great job of explaining them.
Wooden Box: The game comes in a hinged wooden box with a metal latch. It's well constructed and very classy. I'm pretty sure that the sleeve, which says "The City" and slides onto the box, is going to get ripped within the next dozen games, but the box itself is great.
Overall, this is an entirely beautifully produced game that's got great bits which are appropriate and evocative in the game. I also love the smell of wood which wafts from this game. As with all Carcassonnes, the game is also easy to play, with the use of the components being obvious & clearly utilitarian. On the whole, it earns my highest "5" out of "5"Style rating for a game: one of the best I've seen.
The Gameplay
The goal in Carcassonne: The City 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 streets, markets, and residential areas; you'll also get points for building and protecting the city wall.
Setup: The 75 tiles are shuffled and placed in three piles, one each of 30, 25, and 20 tiles; they'll be used in that order. Each player takes 8 followers in his preferred color and 3-6 towers (depending on the number of players). One follower in each color goes on the score track at "0". The walls and city gate are set to the side, for use in the second & third phases of the game.
Order of Play: Each turn each player takes the following actions in order:
- Draw and place a city tile.
- Choose whether to place a follower on the new city tile.
- Score any points earned for completing streets or markets.
Draw and Place a City Tile: Each of the city tiles has up to three terrains on it. Streets cut through the middles of the tiles; they can exit the tile on one, two, three, or four edges. Markets (colored red, blue, or yellow), and residential areas each fill either one, two, three, or four quarters of the tile (sometimes with streets running between them, sometimes not). Some residential areas also have blue public buildings or historical buildings in them (which are only used for guard scoring, as we'll see later).
Each turn a player draws a new city tile, then places it. He must place it orthagonally adjacent to a tile that has already been placed. (The first tile of the game is just placed in the middle of your playing area.)
There's one other rule for placement: streets must match up to any tile which your new tile is placed next to: the street must continue from the adjacent tile/space, not just abruptly end.
There's actually a third rule, which is that you can't place directly outside city walls, but we haven't gotten to those yet since they don't enter the game until the second phase of the game.
Markets and residential areas 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. (Carcassonne: The Castle players will recognize this mechanism.)
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--streets, markets, or residential areas--provided that there isn't already a follower in the same terrain of connected tiles. In other words, if the tile you placed included a market segment, and that connected to a market segment on an adjacent tile which already had a follower, you couldn't place one in the market 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.)
There's one other notable rule for placement: you can't place a follower in a terrain just as it closes. This is another change from the standard Carcassonne rules.
Score Any Points: Markets and streets 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:
- Markets: Closed if all edges are closed by streets or residential areas (or the wall).
- Streets: Closed if both ends trail off or end at intersections (or walls).
Note that residential areas 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 tile of a street is worth 1 or 2 points, and each tile of a market is worth 1-3 points, as described in the scoring chart in the End Game section. The entire score goes to the player with the most followers in the terrain; if there is a tie, each player gets the points.
Building the Wall: After the first pile of 30 tiles is used up, the second pile of 25 tiles enters the game. From this point on whenever a player scores points from a market or street being completed, a wall building round occurs.
During phase 2 (when you're in the second pile of tiles), each player will get to build one wall segment a turn; during phase 3 (when you're in the third pile of tiles), each player will get to build two wall segements a turn, one at a time.
The first time scoring occurs in phase 2, the scoring player gets the city gate, which he puts adjacent to some tile; after that each other player gets to place a wall piece, adjacent to the gate or two other walls. In later rounds each player will get to place a city wall, one at a time, adjacent to the edges of the then-current wall.
Two things happen when a wall is placed.
First, the placing player may choose to place a guard on the wall, if he can't see another guard by looking directly across the city, in the same row/column. (The guard will later score for historical & public buildings in that row/column.) Like the followers placed in residential areas, followers on walls stay there until the end of the game.
Second, markets or streets may be closed by the wall, which blocks the terrain on that side. If this is the case, market or street is scored immediately and the follower returned.
After everyone has placed their 1 (or, later, 2) wall tile, the person who initiated the scoring round may then choose to place one of his towers at one of the edges of the wall. If he does, he gets one point per wall segment between the new tower and either the previous tower or the city gate. This is usually 3-9 points.
End Game: The game ends when one of three criteria is met:
- All tiles are placed; or
- The wall edges have mostly encircled the city and are within 5 spaces of each other; or
- The wall pieces are all used.
At this point walls are placed to finish encircling the city, scoring any streets or markets as appropriate. Then, each player scores points for residential districts, based on numbers of adjacent markets, and points for guards, based on numbers of visible public & historical buildings. The player with the highest score at the end is the winner.
Here's all the scoring in a handy chart.
| Follower | Completed | Incomplete | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market | Seller | 1-3 (# colors)/tile | 0 |
| Residential Area | Steward | N/A | 2/market adjoining |
| Street (1-3 size) | Citizen | 1/tile | 0 |
| Street (4+ size) | Citizen | 2/tile | 0 |
| Wall | Guard | N/A | 2/public + 3/historical |
Moreso than most other Carcassonnes, this one has a really heavy emphasis on end-game scoring, and thus creates a real urge to lock up your meeples for the whole game. I've seen more than one player on more than one game lock up all their meeples on walls or in residential areas (usually to their deficit).
Two Player Games: This game does support 2-player play, and it works well (not a surprise given that it's partially based on the 2-player variant, The Castle). The only change is that each player places 2 wall tiles in each wall-building round in phase 2, and 4 in phase 3.
Relationships to Other Games
Like all of the Carcassonnes, Carcassonne: The City (2004) is an edge-matching tile-laying game with all-or-nothing majority-based area-control scoring. Carcassonne: The City is also one of 5 Carcassonne games currently on the market, the others being Carcassonne (2000), Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers (2002), The Ark of the Covenant (2003) and the 2-player Reiner Knizia design, Carcassonne: The Castle (2003). Carcassonne: The City is the highest-end Carcassonne game, with its wooden box and components. It's also probably the most strategic of the set, with the only other contender being Carcassonne: The Castle, which shares the most similarities in game design with The City.
Here's a chart showing how the original Carcassonne & The City compare:
| Carcassonne | The City | Comments |
| Cities | Markets | Unlike cities, markets are worthless if left incomplete. While cities always scored 2 + occasional bonuses for pennants, markets score 1-3, typically getting more valuable as they get larger. |
| Roads | Streets | Unlike roads, streets are worthless if left incomplete. Also, streets are more valuable than the original roads if they are 4+ in length. |
| Fields | Residential Areas | Fields score 3/city (under current German rules) while residential areas score 2/market, but multiple markets are easier to create due to tile placement rules. |
| Cloisters | N/A | There's nothing like a cloister in The City. |
| N/A | Walls | The walls are a totally new concept, which helps cut off other terrains and also provides new scoring opportunities (guards & towers). |
| Full Edge Matching | Partial Edge Matching | Unlike in the earlier Carcassonnes, you only have to match streets on The City tiles; this is the same rule that was used in Carcassonne: The Castle |
The Game Design
Carcassonne: The City shares much of the game design of the original game. On the good side, this means: multiple strategies (you can concentrate on many ways to get points); all players always thinking (lots of room for kibitzing and looking at what other players can do); encouraged cooperation (since multiple players can benefit from a single scoring); allowed competition (since you can try and block off an opponent's terrains, or share with him when he doesn't want that); and well-controlled randomness (because you always can build multiple types of terrains, and thus most tiles are useful in some way).
Here's some of the things this game adds:
Greatly Increased Strategy: The wall phase adds a whole new and somewhat orthagonal level of strategy to the game. You can use it to block opponents, and at the same time you have to carefully consider what guard-placement opportunities and what tower-placement opportunities opponents might have. This makes the game richer and deeper.
Tighter Play: The play of the new game also feels a lot tighter than any of the others. There's a lot more & harder decisions, particularly surrounding when to use permanently-placed figures (guards and stewards) and which way to build the walls (since you'll often be able to hurt opponents and yourself by building in any specific direction).
All of the Carcassonnes have been great tile-laying games of various degrees of lightness. This one is definitely of the same ilk, but it's the most thoughtful and strategic of the series. It thus earns a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
If this is the last Carcassonne game, that'll probably be a fine thing. Klaus-Jurgen Wrede has taken his original game, pushed it through four years of tuning by both himself and Reiner Knizia, and produced an end-product that positively hums. Carcassonne: The City is the most thoughtful, the most strategic, and the highest quality of the Carcassonne games. My only hesitation in recommending it is the relatively high-price point, but for anyone who likes Carcassonne and likes more complex games as well, this is a must buy.
