Review: Carcassonne:: Carcassonne: A classic Eurogame in a crowded field: how does it hold up today?

by CampingRamen

If you asked me which mechanism is in the most board games, my answer would probably be tile placement. It's everywhere! Whether it's the main course of a game, or if it's just a side to a different mechanism, tile-laying has popped up a lot throughout the modern board game's history. Carcassonne, released in 2000, is a good example of a near-pure tile placement game. In Carcassonne, you are building up southern France, filling it with cities, roads, "cloisters" (our family just calls them churches), and fields.

The gameplay itself is very simple. On your turn, you draw a tile from the stack. You then place it somewhere on the ever-changing "board". You have the option of placing one of your meeples on it, which is the way you will score the tile later down the line, when the feature you placed is completed. And that's the turn structure. No phases, none of that. These guidelines are vague enough to feel free, but also just tricky enough to keep you engaged and heading down "the right track."

Whenever a feature is completed, it gets scored. Roads are scored 1 point for each tile that the road stretches across, cities score 2 points for each tile that it spans, plus another 2 points for each shield depicted on the tiles, cloisters score 9 points once it is fully surrounded both orthogonally and diagonally by tiles, and farms score 3 points for each completed city they touch. This is simple enough, right? Of course it is, but you have to claw and scratch your way to those points, because the other players have different plans. Players will often compete for control of roads and cities, because, players can place meeples on any feature (as long as it isn't orthogonally adjacent), and cities and roads only score for the player who has the most meeples on these features. So, you could spend a good portion of the game building a decent-sized city on the far end of the board, before other players come and throw that city into contest. On the one hand, you're grateful that they are growing the city by adding more tiles to it, but on the other, you're feeling quite frustrated because now you have to waste valuable meeples (meeples are in limited supply and they don't return to your supply until the feature they are located on is scored) trying to contest a city that you built pretty much single-handedly.

What seemed like a nice and peaceful game of tile-laying set in medieval France becomes a tense game as you deploy your meeples to try and take over volatile cities and roads. Since the board is always changing, placing meeples is always a risky decision, because the now-peaceful hamlet could soon become a nightmarish city, which can never be completed because roads are going this way and that, and the shapes just aren't lining up. Every meeple is desperately important in Carcassonne. Throw them onto the board willy-nilly and you soon find that half of them are tied up because the current game state just won't allow it. It's devilishly good fun, trying to wring out some more points while trapping your opponent's meeples (I personally like to imagine that whenever a meeple gets trapped in an unfinished city, it's just this bureaucratic hellscape where nothing ever gets done because everyone is bumping heads with one another).

I think it's clear that I quite like Carcassonne, but I rarely ever play with the expansions. Carcassonne has had many expansions over the years, and I've only ever played with two. I've played with The River, a mini-expansion that helps define the landscape of the board in the early game, and Inns & Cathedrals, which add 2 new types of buildings (you guessed it, inns and cathedrals), as well as a "big meeple", which, when scoring a feature, counts as 2 meeples. We own a big box edition of Carcassonne, but the base game itself is such a great little puzzle that we find ourselves rarely needing the expansions. In my opinion, the River is a highly recommended expansion (not just from me, all base game editions of Carcassonne come with it now (plus The Abbot mini-expansion). I've also played Inns & Cathedrals as a full expansion, but we also sometimes just take the big meeples from the expansion and play the base game with it. There's a lot of variability and the expansions do add quite a lot, but it isn't necessary. That's the hallmark of a truly timeless game: 24 years old, withstanding millions of plays, and many people don't play with the expansions. I'm not averse to the expansions, just don't view them as necessary.

To sum up, Carcassonne is just a great game. Sure, it has all the symptoms of classic Eurogame design (bland theme, bland art (as compared to modern gaming)), but it is a truly great classic that has aged gracefully (which isn't something we'll be able to say about many of the designs of today).