Carcassonne Board Game

Product Information

If you’ve played Carcassonne before, you’ll know some of the features here. Your turn consists of tile placement into a communal, ever-growing landscape. You can place one of your meeples onto that tile, with the aim to complete objectives to score it later. But Hunters and Gatherers takes place in a time before castles and monasteries. Instead, this is a land of forests, rivers, lakes and meadows – complete with wild animals! Beware: this can turn into an area majority game if you’re not careful! It can get competitive (with farmers, in particular). If a player combines a feature with an opponent and one of them has the majority of meeples within, the majority alone scores it.

Carcassonne Big Box | Board Games | Zatu Games UK Carcassonne Big Box | Board Games | Zatu Games UK

As promised, there are also a couple of mini-expansions in Carcassonne. If you’re playing with beginners, the above instructions are enough for your first game or two, to ease people into it. But once you’re familiar with the flow of the game, you could add in The River. The meeples simplicity makes them brilliant especially in their bold colours. The tiles are good quality. I have played my copy countless times and they don’t show signs of wear. The instructions are clear and concise but may daunt those who aren’t used to reading rules. Take it step by step and you will be fine!This dilemma is had by all who play Carcassonne and it is what makes this game so fiendishly fun. While the artwork and the general theme may be quaint and friendly, it is you, the player, who can turn that image around and become rather militant in your tile placing antics! A definite end point. This game never lags or takes a long time to finish. As soon as that last tile is played the games is done and count up the final scores. Usually 45 minutes and rarely past an hour. For me, classic is a curious word. If you were to buy a classic car for example, you know you will be tinkering under the bonnet and fixing patches of rust more often than you would like to. You’ll be scared to take it on a journey in the rain, in fact you’ll generally be too scared for it to leave the garage in case of a breakdown! If there’s any coat of arms within that city, each one scores an extra two points. (So a city that has two coats of arms in it, which spreads over four tiles, scores 12 points. That’s eight for the 4x city tiles, and an extra four points for the 2x coat of arms.) At the end of the game, incomplete cities score half: so one point per tile, and one extra point per coat of arms. Monasteries & Monks – The Lost Jane Austen Manuscript

Games, Carcassonne Under the Big Top, Board Game Z-Man Games, Carcassonne Under the Big Top, Board Game

Transport yourself to the old, medieval, hilltop town of Carcassonne in this tile and worker placement game that has become an absolute staple of the board game world. Many of the tiles have city walls on them. If you want, you could rotate and place this tile so that it connects to (or even completes) an earlier city segment. You cannot place this tile in a manner where it would intersect a road. Neither could you have it so the city walls don’t align with adjacent tiles. As of 2014, Carcassonne also includes two mini-modules in the box: The River, and The Abbot. Later in this post, I’ll teach you how to play Carcassonne with these variants. Firstly, however, let’s take a look at how to play Carcassonne in its original base game form. It’s a perfect ‘gateway game’ for board game beginners and younger players. Set Up The Carca-zone It is evident that the publishers are aware of this too, as there is plenty of space in the box for more tiles. The base tiles in the box do not even fill half of the space available. Final Thoughts

Gameplay

The now universal word ‘meeple’ was coined in November 2000 by Alison Hansel while playing Carcassonne, the fusion of ‘my’ and ‘people’ is now a synonymous term in the board gaming fraternity for any small figural playing piece. Gameplay When placed on a city space a meeple is classed as a knight. On the road, a thief. A monk on a cloister, and a farmer on grasslands. The knight, thief, and monk stay on the board until their respective area is completed, at which point they score victory points and are returned to the player to be used on subsequent turns.

Carcassonne expansion explained - BoardGameGeek Every Carcassonne expansion explained - BoardGameGeek

If you do feel competitive then this game has you covered there too. Its components can be used as an expansion for the original Carcassonne and can even be played alongside other expansions. Final Thoughts I am by large impressed with this edition of a well-loved classic. However, there is always room for improvement. One thing this game is missing however is the inclusion of some expansions that many people deem as ‘essential’ to the core experience. The game would have felt much more complete if it had included at least the Inns & Cathedrals expansion that would give us scoring tiles for complete laps of the scoreboard and the larger meeple for better area control. As well as some risk and reward features. I also consider the Traders & Builders expansion to be essential as it adds reasons for people to close each other’s cities, more reason to claim fields/farmland and reasons to build bigger and bigger with the builder meeple. Some tiles are monasteries, surrounded by fields and sometimes with a road leading out of it. Again, when placing a monastery, you must align it to fit in with the surrounding landscapes. If you place a meeple into this monastery, it becomes a ‘monk’. Monasteries are only ever one tile in size. Meeples placed on fields become farmers, and remain on the field until the end of the game when they score depending on how many cities touch the field. Placing a meeple in a monastery converts it into a monk. It will score you nine points when you surround it in tiles, one point for every tile touching it.

What it’s like

Top tip: placing a farmer early game can be a risk/reward see-saw. It’s a permanent venture, but it prevents other players from jumping in on a profitable location. The risk is other players hem your farmer in with road tiles, and it scores few or even zero points! Oust Opponents And Pinch Points Although you score as you go, there is a final end of game scoring, so you can never be too sure who is going to win until the end. This keeps interest as you will rarely be completely out of a game unless you let your opponents create a mega city. Did you know that the term ‘meeple’ originated in a game of Carcassonne? Shortly after Carcassonne’s release, player Alison Hansel created a portmanteau. When describing her wooden pawns, Alison blended ‘my’ and ‘people’ together –‘meeple’. The term grew in popularity and is now a worldwide term for wooden silhouette player pieces! Turns Are Easy As One, Two, Mee(ple) The game has come on holiday with me to Mexico, Spain, Italy, Scotland and up in the Alps on a skiing trip. We’ve sat with it in assorted hotel rooms around the UK, caravan parks, in bars and even in the waiting rooms of car Garages and a Sainsbury’s cafe. It has put in the miles with me for sure and will continue to do so for many more years to come. The Art

Carcassonne (2015) | Board Games | Zatu Games UK

The setup of the game is simple. Place the starting tile face up in the middle of the play area. Place the remaining game tiles face down to the side and give every player a set of meeples. So, if you are no stranger to Carcassonne then you will not be at a loss here. The artwork has been done in such an interesting and clever way. All the tiles are of course usable with other editions and expansions (mostly) but the small details on the tiles are what make this game really pop. There is UV print on all the tiles and on the box cover itself, giving the game an irresistible gleam. One thing that I never realised until I played this version was how baren the Carcassonne world looked before. Now that we can see little people on the tiles all over the place, it breathes life into the game and makes it feel like a much more real city that we are building. The second mini-expansion features the Abbots. Give one to each player in their colour. You’ll notice that square gardens sit on some of the tiles. They’re not a primary feature like a singular road or an entire monastery. However, you treat them like a monastery, for scoring purposes… You can always place tiles so open fields sit next to open fields. Usually, you’d stand your meeple upright on a feature to claim it as your own. But you can also lay your meeple down in a field, where it becomes a ‘farmer’. Like the other meeples, you cannot place a farmer in a pre-occupied field. I would also like to point out that I really love the rulebook. As like the version as a whole, it stays true to the original but you can tell it has been updated and modernised. There are two different rule books, one is the base game stripped down to the basics that is intended for first time players. The second one adds rules for farmers, the abbot, the river, and the anniversary expansion. I really like that they separated the rules for the farmer, as even though it is not an expansion, it is one thing that a lot of inexperienced players struggle to grasp at first. Can I Mix Other Carcassonne Sets?If you are even remotely aware of the existence of Carcassonne, then you will be aware of the sheer multitude of modular expansions that are available. Some of those have been incorporated into this edition. The ones you may be familiar with are The River and The Abbot expansions. There are also an additional 5 tiles for The River that are new to this edition of the game. Carcassonne sees 2-5 players compete for the most points to be the winner of the game. On their turn, players will draw a tile from a selection of facedown options and they will then place this tile to adjoining laid tiles making sure that any features fit together like a puzzle. They then have the option to place one of their meeples to claim either a road, city, field or monastery if it is on that tile and otherwise unclaimed. The classic style of Carcassonne put into the rural forestry and rivers of the natural environment. It looks stunning for me but others may see it as quite simple. I would say there is a lot more detail in this game over its original predecessor. Plus, the bonus tile adds some additional quality detailing. The Future