Carcassonne

From: Rio Grande Games List Price: $20 Players: 2-5 Playing Time: 45 minutes  Type of game: Family  Skill level: 4 Complexity: 3  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 25, Winter 2001

I have a weakness for tile-laying games. Whether they’re pipe games like Metro or territorial games like Tigris & Euphrates, the combination of positional tactics, aggregate strategy, and the uncertainty of the tile draw create a strong allure for me. Carcassonne’s appeal has been broader than that, capturing the minds of everyone in our group. Carcassonne has been played at every one of our twice-weekly gaming sessions since it arrived, with many players ordering their own copies.

This particular tile game is of the pipe game family. The pipes are pieces of farms, roads, castles, and cloisters which, when tiled together so edges match, create the overhead view of a medieval countryside. Gameplay is simple— draw a tile, play a tile, optionally play a follower, and score any completed features.

Each player has a limited— very limited— supply of followers. When a player plays a tile, he may place a follower on any one feature— road, field, castle, or cloister— on that tile. But only on one feature, only on the tile just played, and only if no other followers on other tiles are already part of that feature. If you extend a road that already has a follower, for example, you can’t add another follower to it. Two separate roads with followers, on the other hand, can legally be joined together if the right tiles get played. Each feature scores only for the player(s) with the most followers on it. As things grow, muscling in for a piece of the action by merging formerly disparate components becomes very important— particularly with lucrative farms.

Followers are tied up until their feature scores, typically when it has no more uncapped ends. It’s especially important to complete castles, since they score twice as much when finished. Stopping opponents from completing features they control therefore has two benefits— restricting their scoring potential, and keeping opponents’ followers from being recycled. Players must remain leery of running out of followers, thereby preventing them from taking advantage of any new opportunities arising from future tile draws.

Each player only holds one tile at a time, so luck of the draw is obviously a major factor here. That luck factor is just right for the game’s, though, which plays in forty-five minutes or less. You can speed things up more by drawing your new tile at the end of your turn, rather than at the beginning as the rules suggest. There’s been some debate about whether or not cloisters are too powerful, being fairly easy ways to score up to 9 points quickly and potentially synergistically with other features a player controls. They can just as easily tie up a follower for the whole game, however, and seem fairly balanced in the long run.

The most interesting tactics in the game involve the farmers. Farms don’t score until the game is over, so every follower placed on a farm permanently reduces a player’s supply. The potential payoff is high, but so is the risk. Besides the opportunity cost of using those followers elsewhere, there’s the chance that someone else’s farmers will outnumber yours and shut you out of scoring. There’s a lot of jockeying in the mid-game as players add farmers and try to connect them to the big tracts of farmland.

Like Metro, Carcassonne is a game of opportunity-fire. You make the most of what you’ve got, and hope you draw the right tiles to complete what you’ve started. Long-term plans ride on a wing and a prayer. Good play, particularly in the realm of defensive tile placement, can certainly make a difference. On the whole, however, this isn’t a game where victory is the result of a carefully laid and brilliantly executed plan. So what’s the attraction? Why the repeated demand session after session?

Carcassonne is an E-ticket ride. You hop in the car, secure your safety harness, and take the dips and curves as they come. Before you know it the ride’s over, and your only thought as you climb out of the car is that you’ve got to get in line and do it again. That’s Carcassonne’s appeal. It’s a quick, simple, non-taxing, and visual group construction project. Entdecker was too light, El Caballero too heavy. Carcassonne hits the sweet spot.