Carcassonne

5th December 2021

Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Carcassonne. You too can wander this French Province, have a hand in building the legendary city, monastries and surrounding country side as well as populating the roads with... errr... highwaymen?

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What's in a game?

• Land tiles: These square card tokens form the bulk of Carcassonne's components. Generally they depict a bit of green countryside along with a feature of some kind, be it a road, corner or junction, a town, monastery or part of a city. However, some tiles will have more than 1 feature.
• Meeples: Classic wooden meeples as you'd find in a classic Eurogame.  They come 5 different coloured sets of 8. 
• Scoring board: A scoreboard depicted in the game's art-style.

That's it for the game components.

What few components the game possesses, are all solidly manufactured. The tiles and scoreboard are constructed of suitably thick card and the meeples are nice wooden tokens.
The artwork found the tiles is for the most fairly small but are well detailed with  colourful illustrations, the meeples are also brightly coloured.
​As the game area is built up over play, it actually looks quite good.
In a game all about joining up tiles, the artwork is universally clear and there's never any confusion on how they connect.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tile: Find the starting tile and place face-up into the central starting area.
• Land tiles: Shuffle all the land tiles into a face-down stack.
• Meeples: Give each player all the meeples in their chosen colour.
• Scoreboard: Put out the scoreboard, every player should put one of their meeples on the zero space - leaving them with 7 meeples each.
• First player: Determine a first player.

That's it for the very simple setup.

On to play
Broadly speaking, Carcassonne is about about building up the central playing area and connecting the game's features, it begins with the opening player taking and playing a land tile into the central play area next to the starting tile, then continues with the player on the left and so on until the stack of face-down tiles has been depleted.

• Place land tile: The active player must take a land tile from the stack and add it to the tile(s) already in play, the tile may be rotated to any orientation but the connection must along their edges and must 'honour' the features already in play and 'continue' them, so a road must continue - unless it reaches an 'end' and so on.
• Place meeple: The active play may choose to place one meeple on the tile they just played, where this meeple is played will determine which 'role' it performs.
  Fields: If it's put on a field, it becomes a farmer.
  Monastery: On a monastery it becomes a monk.
  City: In the city it becomes a knight.
  Road: Putting a meeple on the road and it becomes a robber.
  There is 1 limitation when placing meeples though: A meeple cannot be placed on a feature that already has a meeple on it - regardless who owns that other meeple. Thus if a road already has bandit on it and the active player extends the road, they cannot add a meeple to its.
  Having said that, it's possible to place down a tile with a feature so that it does not connect to another (And a meeple is placed on it.), then connect later so that more than 1 meeple 'share' the feature, why is this significant? See below.
• Scoring: Frequently, when a land tile is placed it will complete a feature such as end a road or close off a city. When this occurs, that feature is immediately scored.
  Roads earn 1 VP per tile they go through.
  A monastery is completed when all the 8 spaces that surround it are occupied by land tiles. This earns the meeples owner 1 VP per title, thus when a monastery is completed it always earns 9 VP.
  Each tile a city sprawls through will earn 2 VP, additionally, each coat-of-arms in the city earns a further 2 VP.
  Fields however, cannot be completed and are only score during the game end and their meeples stay in play throughout the entire game.
  Shared scoring: As mentioned earlier, it's possible that more than 1 meeple will occupy a feature. In this case whoever has the most meeples scores the VP, players with less score 0! If players tie for numbers of meeples occupying a feature, then they all gain the VP.~
  Finally, when a feature is scored, all meeples that occupied it are returned to their players, ready to be made use of again.
• Next player: Once (If any.) scoring is completed, play progresses to the player to the left.

Play continues until the entire face-down stack is depleted.

Endgame
Once play reaches the game end, final scores for uncompleted features are totted up.
This means that an incomplete road (Which has a highwayman on it.) that goes over 2 tiles would score 2 points, monasteries score for partial completion as well at 1VP per. occupied surrounding tile. However, incomplete cities only score half, that is, each tile and coat-of-arms, score 1VP apiece.
Finally, farmers are scored; each completed city that connects to a field that contains a farmer scores VPs for the owning player.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
Carcassonne is a game that's been around for a while now and I have to admit that in the years since I last played it, my opinion on it has softened a little.
Originally I found the randomness inherent to the game when getting a land tile irksome, it felt like it belied strategy and planning. Now however, I can see some mechanical benefit, it forces players to adapt, remain flexible and look for ways to exploit their situation and place tiles in the right places at the right time to gain points or even piggy-back off of other players.

Having said that, my opinion on farmers hasn't changed at all! I still find them fiddly to track and score as well being somewhat unbalanced.
A well placed farmer, especially early in the game can score the controlling player a lot of VPs, putting one down does lock a meeples out of the rest of the game, which can sometimes be detrimental later, but overall, the sacrifice is generally worth it. It's no surprise there's a 'no farmers' optional rule.

One of the things I like about Carcassonne is how it manages to deliver quite a lot of gameplay for such a slim package, just some tiles and meeples - that's it! It means the game has a quick set up time a despite some perhaps fiddly rules, is still fairly straightforward to learn and pick-up-and-play.
I think that this gives Carcassonne strong crossover appeal to 'non-gamers' who will quickly learn the game's basic strategies get up to speed.
This has no doubt contributed to the game's continuing success and makes it a good introductory game for 'non-gamers'.

Carcassonne is a lightweight game and isn't one I'd play too often, truth be told. But it can definitely be fun every once in a while, just don't worry about strategy too much and don't over-analyse it too much either. Play it for the lightweight enjoyment it can provide.