Carcassonne: Tile-laying goodness

“Hey, where’s the board?”
“Oh, it’s coming. Just you wait…”

It’s the year 2000, a new millennium, and Y2K has already been laughed off.

The next big board game hit to take the world by storm and cement tabletop board gaming as a concrete hobby (see what I did there?), is Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s Carcassonne.

A French fortified city in the department of Aude in the region of Occitanie, Carcassonne is widely known for its picturesque clusters of fortified cities and towns, surrounded by quaint patches of farmlands and pastures.

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This unique sort of architecture and landscape panoramas pulls neatly through into the theme and aesthetics of the board game, and lends itself to make Carcassonne the sort of puzzle the whole family can enjoy together.

The most striking thing about the game to new players, are its components. Players each start with eight little wooden figures in their own colour, cut into the shape of men. These little pawns are called “meeples”, a smash-up term meaning “my people”. One of these meeples each go onto the start space of a score track. So the players are left with seven meeples each to play the game with.

And that is it.

No board. Not yet, anyway!

A start tile is place on the table. On it is a small town, with two little roads going out to left and right, and surrounded by green grasslands.

The first player picks up another tile at random. There are 72 in total, and when these run out (and they will do so, quickly, so make sure you do want you intend to do well in time!), the game is over and the final scores tallied.

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The player looks at his new tile. It may depict any variation of the architecture and landscapes reminiscent of Carcassonne; parts of walled cities, roads going off the tile’s edges, grasslands, monasteries, etc.

The player now has to connect this tile adjacent to the start tile, edge to edge, in such a manner that the features depicted on the tiles match; grasslands match to grasslands, roads to roads, city walls to city walls, etc. Illegal placements are not allowed; roads cannot be cut of summarily, city sections may not just open onto grasslands, and so on.

As soon as the tile is place, the player now has the option to place one of his meeples onto a feature of the new tile. If he places it on the road, that meeple now becomes a highway robber. No other player may place their meeples on a connecting piece of road. If he places his meeple inside city walls, that meeple becomes a knight, and similarly, no other player may place a meeple inside the same city sections. If he places his meeple on a monastery, that meeple becomes a monk, and there is no space for another monk inside the same monastery.

Simple so far. So how do you score?

That is where the challenge comes in! Your placed meeples will not score or come off the board (for you see, now a board is actually starting to materialise and take shape!) until you have been able to complete building the infrastructure around it!

Roads need to be completed. You need to place a piece on which the road runs into another small town, thereby legally cutting it off, and you score one point for each segment of road on each piece. The more segments your road is made of, the more you score!

Similarly, you will need to fully build your city’s insides and completely ring it off by walls, to have your knight score two points for each section of city on each tile. Small shield icons on some of these tiles score you a bonus two points each! So, the bigger you are able to make the city inside before completely walling it off, the more you score!

Lastly, your monk will only score once the tile with the monastery it inhabits is completely surrounded on all sides by eight other tiles, orthogonally and diagonally. The monk then scores nine points, one each for all the tiles in the three-by-three grid in which his congregation finds itself!

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This seemingly simple game abounds with hidden strategies and quick tactics. The puzzle-aspect of it poses subtle little challenges; will I be able to draw the tile I need among the few remaining piles? Shall I cap off this road now, or try to extend it by another one or two tiles? Will I be able to finish a new building project if I start one now, so close to the end of the game?

It is easy to see why this game has grabbed the world’s attention these past 20 years the way it has. This is a perfect fit in any family home, and allows grown-ups to play with children and give the kids just as good a chance of winning.

By the game’s end, you will have created a unique and stunning version of the Carcassonnian landscapes; a bird’s eye view of the board will show you beautiful little French cities, neatly walled in, roads worming this way and that through lush green pastures, and colourful little wooden men proudly standing guard over their claims.

A classic like this deserves a place of honour in any board game collection!