I have always been a board gamer really, although for many years hobby wise I was primarily a war gamer and miniature collector, but it was Carcassonne that got me and my friends back into board gaming with a vengeance. My sister brought a copy over from Germany and we played it a few times at family events. I recommended it to pretty much everyone I knew, and from there as a group we bought Settlers of Catan, Zombies, Aquarius, and revisited older gamers like Britannia and Kingmaker.

Carcassonne is a tile laying game, and the tiles represent roads and castles, or rather sections of castle walls. The objective is to lay tiles next to each other so that they match up, thus making longer roads, or joining up bits of castle in order to complete a much larger castle. You have a handful of coloured meeples with which to claim a tile when you lay it, and thus score for a road or castle when you complete it, so long as you have the most meeples on the road/castle.

This is important, as you cannot lay a meeple on a road if it is linked to another tile by the same road, and the same applies to a castle. You can sneak in on another player’s road/castle however by placing a tile nearby, so that it is not directly linked, place your meeple on it and then lay more tiles to link the road or castle together. When roads or castles are completed with an equal number of meeples of different colours on them, each player with the most meeples on the road/castle scores for it.

And this is where the tactic of stealing comes in, as you could do this with two meeples, join both of them onto a road/castle, and then only you would score for the road/castle as you would have the most meeples on it. Another tactic is obstruction, in that you could lay tiles near an opponent’s road/castle, so that they require a certain tile in order to complete it. The expansions for Carcassonne have more complicated tiles, which makes it even easier to obstruct other players. 

In the base game however, the other crucial element is the fields that lie between the roads and castles. Normally when you complete a road or castle you take your meeple back into your pool of meeples, but when you lay a meeple on a field it is placed on its side to show that it stays there until the end of the game, as you only score for fields at that point. If you have a meeple in a field you score for each completed castle that has its walls linked to the field that the meeple is in.

Fighting over the fields can become an important part of Carcassonne, but you have to be careful, because canny players can use roads and castles to block your meeple in so that its field is very limited, leading to a minimal score at the end. It is important to pay attention to what your opponents are doing therefore, as although you can clearly see how players are currently scoring on the track, you need to be fairly savvy about what the potential scores for the fields are going to be.

The tiles are brightly coloured and easy to tell apart, they are also good chunky card board. The meeples are well, meeples, or if you are not familiar with the concept of meeples they are little coloured pawns in the shape of blobby dancing people. The scoring track is very good, sits easily at the edge of the playing area, and comes with several tiles scored at 50 or 100 so that if you pass all round the scoring track past the 49 you pick up a 50 and later a 100 to cover larger scores.

Carcassonne is great for casual players, as it is easy to socialise over while playing. It is a very light game and plays quickly, although some players can spend a while deliberating over the last couple of tiles they lay to score the most points. Its most obvious drawback is also its lightness, as serious gamers might consider it too ‘lightweight’. There are a ton of expansions however, each of which adds an extra little something to the game, and two or three expansions make Carcassonne much more interesting, and definitely extend its replay ability.