Carcassonne is a clever tile-laying game. The southern French city of Carcassonne is famous for its unique Roman and Medieval fortifications.
The players develop the area around Carcassonne and deploy their followers on the roads, in the cities, in the cloisters, and in the fields. The skill of the players to develop the area will determine who is victorious.
Winner of the prestigious Spiel Des Jahres (German Game of the Year) in 2001, Carcassonne is quite simply the best board game you’ve never played. The unique concept behind Carcassonne has players actually constructing the board as they play, interlocking the finely-crafted selection of 72 tiles that comprise the game and scoring points based on how many cities, roads, fields and cloisters (monk houses) they develop and control. Since the game board may expand in any direction a large table is preferred, unless you can play on the floor and avoid toddlers, pets and other tile-disturbing hazards.
Players begin a Carcassonne game by finding the special starting tile and placing it onto the gaming surface. The remaining tiles are shuffled and mixed face-down, finally being placed into several random stacks off to the side of the table usually beside the scoreboard. A player is chosen to go first, typically the previous game winner, and selects one of the face-down tiles from the stack.
Then, the player connects the drawn tile to the starting tile and the game board begins to develop into a beautiful, evolving arrangement of tiles that form an intricate landscape of controlled territory. Players continue to connect their drawn tiles to the board in sequence until all tiles are exhausted, at which point the game ends.
Quick Tips from Brainiac
First, if you can, assess the other Carcassonne board game players. How do they play? Do they prefer to farm, or build cities or roads? Do they know how you like to play? If you can figure out their way of playing, you can alter your playing style to beat theirs.
Define if you want to use a defensive or offensive game strategy. A defensive strategy would focus on building your own roads, cities and farms, and forming the board with your own goals in mind. An offensive strategy would deal more with stealing other peoples’ cities, roads and farms, essentially making them waste all of the time and meeples that they spent building them.
Think about placement strategy. First, think about yourself: are you a person who focuses on details, or sees the whole picture? If you’re a details person, I would recommend building your land on a small portion of the board, rather than branching out around the board. If you’re good at seeing the whole picture, go ahead and build all around the board – it may make it harder for others to stop you from gaining points since you’ll have land in all areas. On the other hand, if you keep everything close, you’ve got more meeples in one area, which makes that area stronger for you.
Decide whether you want to be a big builder or create quick points. Quick points occur with small, two point roads and small cities. If you do this, you’ll accumulate more points without people being able to steal your properties, but you may lose the ability to gain more points overall. When you choose to build big roads, cities and farms, you have the chance to gain more points later in the game, while having a slow start. This method is great, but you need to be careful that no one steals your large cities, roads and farms.
To farm or not to farm…and when? Farming is tough because your meeples stay on the farm until the game ends, and if someone steals your farm by adding more of their meeples, they’ve stolen your farm and made your meeples useless. I like to use three meeples as farmers to get a good hold on the farmland before others do, and make it harder for anyone to take my farmland (or get any other good farmland). Farming is a preference – it can be done in the beginning to claim your farms, or at the end to maximize the use of your meeples. Or, not at all.
Choose if you want to make use of cloisters (these look kind of like castles). They’re great to gain points, but are hard to finish, and can leave your meeple hanging out on the board for the whole game. If you do use cloisters, always place them where you think you can finish them, otherwise you’ve lost a game piece for the remainder of the game.
Finally, consider your meeples. Always keep one meeple off the board, if you can, so you can use it if you really need it. This works until the end of the game, when you should use all of your meeples any way you can. At the end of the game, every point counts, and every meeple can make you an extra point.
Download Carcassonne Game Rules.
