jenscookie's Full Review: Rio Grande Games Carcassonne Game
Carcassonne is a German-style board game. The "board" is actually built during the course of the game as the players add tiles to the board. It's a spacial puzzle, first of all as your pieces must match the ones you place them by- a tile with a city border must be placed by a like tile, and a road must not dead end into a city or open countryside, etc. It this way it's not unlike dominoes or Nile, and old favorite family game.
When you place a tile, you can also place a follower- a wooden figure known as a meeple (meeples, pl.). You can place them on whatever feature the tile has- a knight in a city, a farmer in a field, a monk in a cloister, or a highwayman on the road. When the feature is completed, you score points. Points are kept on a separate board, like in cribbage. The farmers are a big key to scoring. Their points are not counted until the end. Then you get points for farmers in fields that border completed cities. Another factor in the farmer rule is it encourages players with farmers to help complete cities, even those controlled by others' meeple- a feature of the game that encourages cooperation as well as competition.
There are some other more complicated rules about sharing features, particularly cities, and scoring. It's best just to play the game a few times and look up these more intricate rules as the game progresses. Age 8 and up is recommended. If you have a chess player, or someone who likes intricate puzzles, who is younger, I'm sure they're up for this one.
Meeple are my favorite feature of the game. They remind me of little wooden toy sets from Germany I had as a child. Also of the little toys that come in gumball machines. If you ever spent hours making up your own games, using Barbie shoes and matchbox cars as playing pieces, you will enjoy a good German-style board game.
The best thing about the way the game is played is that quite a bit of scoring is left until the end (farmers, uncompleted cities and roads). Many games become tedious and unhappy because one player takes a lead and then the others (especially if they are younger) become dispirited, and conflicts develop as the inevitable result draws to a close. In Carcassonne, playing the game is fun in itself. My daughter likes to build huge, never-ending cities, for example. My husband has developed a very good understanding of the farmer rule, and always seems to win. I simply like to see how different combinations of features play out. So there is really something for everyone. The basic game takes 45 minutes to an hour to play. This is a nice contrast to the games of Risk we have played which have stretched over entire 3 day weekends filled with endless bitter strife over Irkustsk, Egypt and Iceland. Be warned, if you keep buying the Carcassonne add-ons, it increases the time length as you have more tiles to play.
Up to 5 players can play with the basic set because their are 5 colors of wooden followers. You could add your own creative meeple if you wanted too (with similar small toys). But Carcassonne has several add-on games that include more sets of meeple.
Carcassonne is made in Germany by Hans im Gluck and distrubuted in the US by Rio Grande Games. It usually runs about $25-30. The entire game fits in a sturdy blue box about the size of a Harry Potter hardcover.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 25 Type of Toy: Board Game
Age Range of Child: 9 Years or Older
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