Geek vs Life

Today’s board game review: Carcassonne.

Carcassonne was an important trade route in medieval France. It had many walled cities, and many roads taking you around the countryside. This where the game takes place. The cool thing about the board is every time you play the game it changes. It is a tile based board game. You randomly flip over a piece and build the board. It is somewhat like a puzzle the pieces have to make sense. A piece with a road has to connect to a road, and city to city.

The object is simply. Have more points than you opponent. How do you get points? You get points by your followers. Your followers become medieval occupations. These occupations are knight, thief, monk, or farmer. (I promise this is not a role playing game.) You have a total of seven followers, however you don’t just decide what follower is what occupation, the tile informs what choices you have.

If you have a tile that has a road on it, then you place a thief on it. It it has part of a city on it, you may place a knight on the city. If it has a monastery then you can place a monk. If it has green fields, you can place a farmer. In fact most tiles give you two or three choices. The caveat is say, if Joe has placed a thief on a road, if I connect the road on my turn, I cannot place a thief on that same road knowingly he has a thief on it. Now sometimes things build into each other, and if that is the case whomever has the most followers of that occupation get the points for the completion of building. If there is a ties in the amount of followers then both the players get points.

How does one complete building? Well it depends on what you need to build. Roads are the most easy. They have to start somewhere and end somewhere. Doing so nets the thief one point for each tile that the road occupies. The knight gets his points when his city is completely surrounded by walls. He gets two points be tile, and sometime bonuses points if there is shield emblem on the city tiles. The monk get his points by being completely surrounded by correctly placed tiles. Imagine the cloister is the center of a Tic Tac Toe board. This gives the monk nine points. These followers come back when you complete their objective giving you more chances to deploying your followers in other professions. That does leave one occupation not discussed.

The occupation of the farmer is the most difficult for new players. The farmer gives a player four points at the end of the game for being in a field next to a completed city. The hard part for new players is a field is bordered by roads, rivers, city walls, and edges of tiles. This can make some fields quite large “feeding” many cities (and conversely quite small), also you need to have the most farmers to win a city. (This is like the other occupations, but doubling up happens more by the end of the game.) Again farmers don’t get points until the end of the game, so when placing a farmer, one has to be careful. You are not seeing that investment until the end. Remember you have only a total of seven followers.

Anyhow this is not meant to be an official rule book, just to give you a taste. It is an easy strategic game. It is has more to do with chance. Will you get the tiles to complete your follower’s objective? Should you go for easy points or place your piece in a quagmire of a huge city. If and when should you place your farmer?

The game is played with two to five players. It takes about thirty to forty minutes to play. You may get expansions that add more tiles, more professions, and just more strategy. It is a simple game to play but offers many possibilities. It is not intimating, and again has no warring with other players. Although you can screw them over…

It is a perfect game for a board game party. It contains very little math, and almost no trading. It is easy to learn.