Review of Carcassonne Expansion 4: The Tower

Blurb from the publisher: 'Towering above the countryside.

The Tower gives players a direct, strategic method of interacting with other players. When placing a tile depicting a foundation, the player can place a tower floor on that tile or on any open tower on the board. The player can then capture any other player's follower on the board that is visible from the tower. Captured followers are only returned by paying three victory points or "exchanging" prisoners with someone holding one of your followers. The Tower also makes it easier to keep your play area in order. The Tile Tower accessory organizes your tiles from the base game and expansions, making everything easy to access as you play.'

What you get: Your USD 19,99 or equivalent will buy you Carcassonne Expansion 4: The Tower, an expansion for the Carcassonne game line, a game of tile building and pattern placement that can accommodate from 2 to 6 players. The base game has won a number of accolades, has been as commercially successful as a non-collectible game can ever be, and is rightfully considered a modern classic. Game time can be as short as 40 or 45 minutes (depending on which side of the box you believe) if you are only using the base game along with this expansion. It can however expand to multiple times that, if you start a game that incorporates more than one expansion.

In addition to the small 4-page English rulebook which can also be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: a cardboard tower made of three pieces, 30 wooden Tower Floors, and 18 Land Tiles with a Tower foundation.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have been playing Carcassonne since it came out, back in the day when the original box was much smaller and contained less than the current basic box. This is not your usual playtest.

Gameplay: The cardboard tower is a convenient way of storing the game's unused tiles during the game. It can store up to 180 tiles; I won't even bother to count how many expansions you can use before the tower becomes inundated with tiles.

Depending on the number of players, each player will have access to a different number of tower floors (from ten in a 2-player game to five in a 6-player game). When a tile with a tower base is placed, the player that placed it has four different options. The first is the very standard 'place a meeple on the tile you just placed'. The other three are brand new: place one tower floor on the tower foundation of any tile, or one tower floor on any existing open tower on the board, or one meeple on any open tower on the board, effectively closing it.

Each time a floor is placed on a tile, it captures meeples one tile away in all four (non-diagonal) directions. The first floor will capture meeples one tile away, the second two tiles away, and so on and so forth. The meeples are kept by the person who just captured them. They will be returned to their owners' hands either when their owners decide to pay 3 VPs per captured meeple, or when that player also captures a meeple of the first player, a case in which the exchange happens automatically. Tower floors are indiscriminate; they will also remove your meeples from the board, even though you obviously don't need to reclaim them in any way.

The expansion's last page explains all the possible interaction with the later Carcassonne expansions. As an example, pigs, builders and barns cannot be captured, while large meeples, abbots, wagons, and mayors can.

The strong points: Direct confrontation, huzzah! I am exaggerating, but this was Carcassonne's first expansion which inserted a strong take-that element into the game. The placement of tower foundations looks innocent enough, yet it changes many of the game's assumptions.

First, when a tile of this kind gets placed, it gives one access not only to it, but to every other tile with a foundation on the board that remains still open (I.e. nobody has placed a meeple on that tower's foundations or floors). Depending on how many expansions you are using, and how well into the game you are, the consequences can be devastating. Nobody enjoys investing in a big territory, be it a city or a land, only to see his meeples disappear. Thus, the first and foremost play adaptation is that knowledgeable players will immediately focus on easy gains. That doesn't necessarily mean smaller areas; it also means better protected areas, where tiles have already been laid nearby.

The second play adaptation regards the new and extremely pressing consideration to tile placement: you cannot let anybody keep your meeples hostage. Thus, if you have the opportunity to immediately capture a meeple of a player that already captured one of yours, you are very likely to play exactly that move, in order not to pay out the 3 VPs. The VP ransom is enormous, mind you. Not only you go down 3 VPs yourself, the other player goes up by the same amount; that's a difference of six VPs out of nothing. If you systematically pay that ransom, you are either desperate or you are playing to lose. Only masterful tacticians can pay the price without it ultimately costing them the game.

The third play adaptation relates to the towers themselves. To put it simply, they tend to create either unexplored spaces around them, or spaces whose controlling meeples are double distanced due to safety concerns. It makes perfect sense, yet it is another game from the one you are used to. There are ways of modulating this effect. If you use The Tower with another few expansions, tower tiles will obviously be less prominent. If you use The Tower with the basic game only, brace yourself. It will be a killing (or rather a kidnapping) ground.

Carcassonne's replayability is very high even if one plays with the basic game only. Seeing how dynamically The Tower alters the basic game, you can count on it to provide totally different gaming experiences.

The production values of the whole line are very high. The artwork is identical to the one we already know and love. Every expansion has its own dedicated pictograph, allowing you to insert and extract expansions as you see fit. No changes here.

If you didn't like this expansion, or if you liked it so much that you wish to see even more of them, you are in luck. The line has eight expansions not included in the Carcassonne Big Box 2017. We are going through all of them together as we speak.

The weak points: The Tower had created quite the furor when it first came out in 2005 due to it being at odds with the up to then non-confrontational spirit of the basic game. Fifteen years later, it is still one of the worst offenders. If you enjoy Carcassonne for its non-confrontational aspects, avoid it. It really is as simple as that.

Frankly, there aren't any functional tactics that will work if you wish to use the new tiles for their background while omitting the take-that aspect... ...unless if you house-rule that the tower's foundations don't mean jack shit. Any other solution simply won't work. Placing meeples on the foundations as a stop-gap is a rather pathetic tactic. First, because you are losing a meeple that could have been more useful elsewhere. Second, because nothing prohibits an opponent of placing a tile with a foundation right next to the tile that you just laid, capture your meeple with his new tower, and then open up the tower foundations you initially placed for further abuse. Satanic, isn't it?

The cardboard tower is a gimmick. A pretty gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless. What I found annoying however is that the game strongly recommends not to assemble and disassemble the tower every time you wish to play. I understand that, the cardboard gets slowly warped and ground down. Yet, for all those of us space-starved gamers, where is one to put it? Keep yet another box in his library? My extensive Carcassonne collection fits smugly in my Carcassonne Big Box, the contents of this expansion included... ...provided that I assemble and disassemble the tower every single time. Granted, I do it with great patience and care, yet I know that I ultimately damage it every time I use it. A better engineering solution should have been found here, and especially since this game exists for such a long time.

Depending on where you come from and which base game you have (the standard box or the Big Box), you might not care about either this expansion, or any expansion whatsoever. That's totally understandable. It is humanly impossible to play a proper game that incorporates all the expansions. Not only it would take an enormous amount of time, it would effectively become an exercise in accounting of futures and derivatives including currency exchanges.

I appreciated the index at the end of the Big Box, breaking down the tiles' sides so that a player can deconstruct and learn the game more easily. There is no such index here. Why not?

Compare the price of the Big Box to the price of each expansion separately, and it becomes obvious that every expansion is rather expensive for what it offers. The Tower is actually one of the worst offenders, seeing how most of its content is a gimmick.

Inconsequential as they might be, there are typos on thsixe box and in the rulebook. This is not the first Carcassonne expansion to have typos. Good grief.

Conclusion: Carcassonne Expansion 4: The Tower fundamentally alters the nature of Carcassonne. The take-that aspect doesn't come alone; the way you play the game is bound to change as a result. Depending on what you are looking for in a game, this might or might not be an expansion you want to invest in. As for the cardboard tower, Monty Python's Patsy said it better:'It's only a model'. An expensive model, I would add.

For more info on Carcassonne Expansion 4: The Tower and Z-Man Games visit their website at http://www.zmangames.com.

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