Meeples & Monasteries: A Preview of Carcassonne
SUMMARY:
Ages: 7+
Players: 2-5
Est. Length: 30-45 Minutes
Game Design: Klaus-Jurgen Wrede
Illustration: Doris Matthuas, Anne Patzke, Chris Quilliams, Klaus-Jurgen Wrede
Publisher: Z-Man Games
Genre: Family
Mechanics: Tile Placement, Map Addition, Area Majority
Reviewer: Lex Judge
INTRODUCTION
Carcassonne was designed and released in 2000 by German board game designer, novelist, teacher, musician, and theologian, Klau-Jurgen Wrede. The success of the game “overwhelmed him like a wave”, and he’s spent the many years since building off of that success, designing a vast number of Carcassonne expansions, as well as other board games.
Carcassonne is a tile-based strategy game. The game’s mechanics are relatively straightforward, but it still offers a satisfying and challenging puzzle to be solved. A puzzle is an apt way to describe it, because studying and rotating the tiles to be added to the map really does feel like doing a jigsaw puzzle. It feels like there is a perfect spot and orientation for every tile.
The French city of Carcassonne is known for its cities fortified by distinct stone walls and towers. In this game players will be competing to control a number of these cities, as well as the surrounding roads, cloisters, and farms. Unlike most area majority games, Carcassonne does not come with a large board or map. Instead, the map is made as the game progresses. Starting with a single tile, players will take turns adding tiles to it, expanding the map until all the tiles have been placed. This means no two games will ever be the same.
On their turn, a player draws a tile from a face down deck, and places that tile next to one of the other tiles in play. The tiles can have a number of different features on it, such as roads, cities, monasteries, and fields. When you play a tile, the features on the sides have to match the tiles next to it, meaning you must connect, expand, and finish roads, cities, and fields.
After a player adds their tile to the map, they then have the option to place one of their wooden people (commonly referred to as a “meeple”) on the tile they just placed. The meeple represents a certain type of worker depending on what feature you place them on. A meeple placed on a city becomes a knight, one placed on a road becomes a highwayman, placing one on a monastery turns it into a monk, and laying one down on a field makes it a farmer.
After the tile and meeple has been placed, the player checks to see if a feature has been completed. If it has, any meeples on the completed feature is returned to the player, and the players are rewarded points based on the type of feature it is.
After the last tile has been placed, final scoring is done, and the player with the highest score wins!
THE MOMENT THE GAME “CLICKED”
Unlike watching television or reading a book, board games inherently have a learning curve. Every time you want to play a new game, you first have to learn how to play it. Games vary in difficulty and complexity, but every game has a moment where it just “clicks”. Once this moment happens, you’re able to fully grasp how the game is played, and what the goal is. This moment happens at different times for different people, but having an idea of when it can happen is a good indicator of whether or not you’ll enjoy learning and playing a game.
Like most of our other Starting Line games, Carcassonne is very easy to learn and teach. What you can do on a turn is easy to understand, but difficult to master. After the first two or three turns, players should start to see how the game is going to shake out and what some of the best ways to score points are. That being said, the randomness of the order in which tiles comes out really makes each game play very differently, and you’ll need a good amount of both strategy and luck to pull off a win.
SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?
With a simple ruleset, and many choices/strategies to choose from, Carcassonne is beloved by many for good reason. The game is well paced, it never feels too long or too short, and the number/types of tiles lends itself to tense decision making. It’s a very well balanced game, with the only major luck factor coming from the randomness of the tile pile. In fact, that’s one of my only complaints about Carcassonne. Sometimes you can spend the whole game looking for a specific type of tile, only for one of your opponents to get it, blocking you from scoring a large portion of your points. It’s frustrating when you needed that one tile to get your meeples back to use them for other things. If all of your meeples end up getting stuck out on the map, it leaves you with nothing to do and no way to get back in the game. Not being able to do anything on your turn never feels very good, but thankfully Carcassonne is not a game where that happens very often, and a player should be able to play around getting stuck like that.
Since it’s release, Carcassonne has had a vast number of expansions, most of which come highly recommended by most reviewers. I only own the base game and have yet to feel the need to add any expansions to it, but it’s nice to know that they are there if the game starts to feel overplayed. What expansion do you think adds the most to Carcassonne? Let us know in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
