Carcassonne - Review

Carcassonne is a game I’ve owned for a long time, and is probably the game that began my love of board gaming. On their turns, places take a tile from the stack, and place it adjacent to another tile, so that similar tile elements connect to each other – roads to roads, cities to cities, and fields to fields. It is primarily a tile placement game, with an element of worker placement as well, so choosing where to place a tile can prove pivotal – do you focus on scoring points, or work on blocking your opponents? Carcassonne is a very strategic game, but does have a luck element involved. People seem to love it or hate it; I tend to hear more of the former, but those who’ve played against me one too many times will avoid playing it at all costs.

A game of Carcassonne in progress.

Set-up: 9/10

Setting up Carcassonne is easy, find the starting tile (it has a different coloured back to the other tiles), play it in the centre of your table, and then shuffle up the rest of the tokens. That’s it! The hardest part is finding the starting tile at the end of the game, but if you know roughly where it is it’s easing to find.

Mechanics: 9/10

The mechanics of the game are simple to learn; each player takes in it turn to draw and place a tile. Once the tile is placed, they may choose to place a meeple on the tile. There are some restrictions to this – meeples must be placed on the tile played, and can’t be placed on a road, city, or field that already contains a meeple, although you can link up previously unconnected roads, cities, and fields. The real challenge comes in learning the strategy behind tile and meeple placement, knowing where and when to place a tile and meeple, but this is something you learn over time, and is key to victory.

An assortment of tiles from the game, featuring roads, cities, and cloisters.

Scoring: 7/10

For the most part, scoring occurs throughout the game, and is easy to keep track of using the board. When a city, road, or monastery is completed, they are scored and the meeple(s) returned to the appropriate player(s). Incomplete cities, roads, and monasteries are scored at the end of the game; cities yield only half as many points if they are incomplete, but roads and monasteries score in the same manner as usual. Fields (and farmers) are scored at the end of the game. As fields give players the highest number of points, it can mean games appear to be favouring one player, and then the points will swing heavily in another player’s direction. On the contrary, if players are relatively close on points before scoring fields, it can be disheartening for players who know they can’t win to keep playing, removing some of the fun from the game. Unfortunately, due to the heavy weighting of fields, some players prefer to play the game without them, as they feel they detract from the game.

Speed: 7/10

Carcassonne takes around thirty minutes to play, although sometimes it can take longer. It provides enough depth and strategy to still be interesting despite this play time. Earlier turns tend to be quicker to play, as players have fewer option for tile placement, whilst later turns are usually longer, as players have more options on where to play their tile, and fewer meeples to place on it. Changing the number of players can impact the speed of the game, depending on how experienced players are, as you have to think about how your turn affects multiple players.

Replayability: 8/10

Carcassonne is a great game, one that can be played over and over again. Due to the randomness of tile drawing, each game is different, with players building cities and roads of different size. The base game contains enough pieces to play with up to five players, and adding more players really changes how the game plays, which means you need to learn different strategies for games. Unfortunately, like most games, if there’s a large difference in skill level between players, it can be obvious during the game, and will be reflected heavily in the scores. If you play regularly against an opponent and there’s a significant difference in skill, you may find Carcassonne less fun, as one player wins more often.

Carcassonne has a variety of expansions which make it even more replayable!

Final Thoughts:

Overall, I love playing Carcassonne. It’s a great gateway game, for those people interest in picking up board games, or learning about tile placement or worker placement games. It works well regardless of the number of players you have; we’ve played most often with two players but have also had lots of fun playing with more people. Unfortunately, I don’t get to play too often – apparently, I’m too mean – so if you’re looking for a game where you can’t interfere with your opponents too much, this probably isn’t the game for you. However, if you’re looking for a relatively fast-paced game with depth and strategy, you’ll probably like Carcassonne! It has a whole host of expansions available for it, which significantly increases the amount you’ll want to play the game, so you can really tailor how you play the game. At £25-£30, Carcassonne is on the cheaper side of some of the bigger board games, and I wholeheartedly recommend picking up a copy.

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Chris