Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
This game was originally produced by Hans im Gluck in Germany.
This is a rewrite and expansion of a review of Carcassonne originally published in August 2002.
The Components
Carcassonne comes with a
small set of high quality components, including:
- 72 land tiles
- 1 scoring track
- 8 followers each in 5 different colors
- 1 rule booklet
Tiles: The land tiles are printed in four colors on heavy cardboard. They depict cities, roads, cloisters, and fields--the four core locales of the game. The drawings are attractive, appropriate to the Medieval period that the game evokes, and fit together well.
Scoring Track: The scoring board is about 7"x10", printed in four-color on the same heavy cardboard as the tiles. The numbers on the scoring board (0-49) each have a very thin border around them, that is sometimes broken; this made it hard for one of our playtesters to read, but over about a dozen games have proven untroublesome otherwise.
Wooden Pieces: The followers are made out of sturdy painted wood, fairly standard for a European game import. They come in red, green, yellow, blue, and black--all distinctive colors that are easy to distinguish. These followers are also called "meeples"; as noted under The Gameplay, they can act as knights, thieves, monks, or farmers, depending on where they're placed in game.
Rules: The rules are also four-color, printed on glossy paper that's a little too flimsy. My copy has already been dinged, banged, and bent from usage. The rules use a very large number of pictures as examples, which make them very easy to understand.
Missing from The Components is something like a bag to draw the tiles from. They can be flipped upside down, and drawn from stacks, but this seems somehow inelegant. During playtests of this basic game, we typically held the box with all the tiles above our heads to draw.
The River Components
The most recent printing of Carcassonne also includes "the river expansion". This set of 12 tiles was originally offered as a free promotion before it was incorporated into the game. I'd considered reviewing them separately, as one of many Carcassonne expansions now in print, but instead decided to simply break out the discussion of these tiles within this review.
More Tiles: The river tiles are identical in quality to the rest of the land tiles, but with a river running through them.
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
The goal in Carcassonne is to gather as many points as possible, through the placement of followers to control large cities, roads, and fields, as well as cloisters.
Game play begins with the placement of a special starting tiles which includes a corner of a city, a straight road segment, and fields on either side of the road.
After that each player, in turn, takes the following actions:
- Draw and place a land tile.
- Choose whether to place a follower on the new land tile.
- Score any points earned for completing cloisters, road, or cities.
Following are additional explanation of each of these steps.
Draw and Place a Land Tile: The tiles are the heart of the game. Each one has some combination of cities, roads, and cloisters on them. Cloisters are singular buildings which sit in the middle of a tile, while roads and cities can connect to similar terrains off-tile. Running along the edges of all the roads, cities, and cloisters are fields. On-tile they can be divided up by cities and roads, while off-tile they'll connect to other fields too.
In order to place a tile, you must lay it down next to another tile with a matching edge. The edges are very simple; each one only has one of three elements: a full-length city; one road; or a field. Thus placement is very simple.
Because of this simplicity, there's almost always a legal placement for a tile. In the dozen or so 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).
In the rare event that the drawn tile cannot be placed, it is discarded from the game and the player immediately draws a new tile and continues with the game.
If you wish a more strategic variant of Carcassonne, a
possible variant is to maintain a hand of 3 tiles. Draw a new
tile each turn, then play the tile of your choice. This allows
you more potential to plan ahead.
Choose Whether to Place
a Follower: 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. After
you place each tile you may choose to place a follower on that
tile, if you wish.
In order to place a follower, you must select one of the terrain segments on a tile. You can place a follower in one of four places: in a city; on a road; in a field; or in a cloister. With most tiles you'll have 2-4 options as to where to place your follower. For example, if you placed a tile with road running down the middle, you could choose to place a follower on the road or on either of the two field segments. As a convention, Carcassonne has a different name for each type of follower placement. A follower in a city is a knight, a follower on a road is a thief, a follower in a field is a farmer, and a follower in a cloister is a monk.
There's one limitation: you can't place a follower within a terrain that already contains a follower. Thus if you placed a tile with a city segment that connected up to an existing city, you could only place a knight there if there was not already a knight in the city. There are ways to share a specific terrain; you simply must place a follower in a disconnected part of the terrain, and then connect it.
One type of land tile warrants a special comment: some city tiles have pennants on them--little blue & white shields. These are extra-valuable city tiles which are worth increased points when scored.
Score Any Points: Cities, cloisters, and roads can all be "completed", allowing you to immediately score their points. Each of the terrains has a simple rule for how to complete it:
- 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.
Fields cannot be completed during the game; even if a field is totally closed off during the game, the points are not scored and the follower is not retrieved.
Before a city, cloister, or road can be scored, it must first be determined who owns it, because there can be multiple followers in a single completed location, as already noted. The player with the most followers in the terrains scores all the points; in case of a tie, each player scores all 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 points than open cities. All the scores are listed below, in the End Game section.
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.
Afterward, fields are scored. Inevitably lots of fields have ended up with multiple farmers as the game has expanded. The normal rules for majority are used to determine who's in control of the field. Each farmer then earns points for each completed city he's adjacent too.
Here's a chart of all the point scoring:
| Follower | Complete | Incomplete | |
|---|---|---|---|
| City | Knight | 2/tile + 2/pennant | 1/tile + 1/pennant |
| Road | Thief | 1/tile | 1/tile |
| Cloister | Monk | 1 + 1/adj. tile | 1 + 1/adj. tile |
| Field | Farmer | N/A | 3/completed city adjoining Note also that you get points for a city only once - even if you're in the majority in multiple fields surrounding one and the same city. |