When I want to get away from video games, I turn to board games. I do understand that board games are non-video video games, but just allow me my short illusion with the genre. It’s why Digitalchumps is reviewing board games now. It’s how we are here. Anyway, rambling aside, my wife and I had the pleasure of playing Carcassonne from Z-Man Games. It was promoted as the next Catan which piqued my interest. I’m a huge Catan fan having bought every iteration of it electronically and in physical form, so boasting such a thing was bold. Did it ring true? Nope, but Carcassonne brought a type of gameplay that could certainly fit in the Catan family.
Let’s get this going.
Not Catan and that is okay
Carcassonne has a few things that Catan has – people and land. There aren’t sheep, brick, lumber, stone, wheat, or a pirate ready to pillage a village. Rather, Carcassonne is a random card-drawing game that allows you to build your kingdom as you see fit and be rewarded for certain accomplishments. It’s just that simple, and it gets easier, which is awesome.
You start the game by choosing a team. The teams come in different colors and are basically just people shapes. You use these people figures to claim land, kingdoms, paths, and monasteries. There is a finite amount of people, so your claims are limited. Should you complete a claim, you can re-claim the figures, but otherwise, you will have to account for what is worth claiming and what is not. It’s one of the first lessons that Kelly and I learned when playing this game. Make sure that what you’re claiming provides enough points to justify not claiming something else. It’s the first strategy you’ll learn in the game and a valuable one. Should you leave something unclaimed, the other player can claim it with their figures. There is a risk in claims.
How you acquire these claims for your people starts with piles of random cards containing the previously mentioned pieces. The land, kingdom pieces, paths, and monasteries are in these piles and each player flips a card during their turn to add to lands that connect or can build into a city. You are essentially connecting the dots and completing pieces before your opponent. For example, you will find pieces of a kingdom that you can put together slowly to become a kingdom as big as you want, or as small as you want. The only requirement to build this kingdom is to make sure it has connecting walls. Once you complete said kingdom, then you can count the number of tiles it took to build it, multiply it times two, and then move a character on a dedicated score sheet (that looks like a simple Candyland path) progressively up a point scale. More points can be awarded during this phase of the kingdom building if there is a shield on the kingdom, which gives you two additional points per shield (you can have multiple shields). The name of the game is to build claims as big as you can before the other player builds something bigger. The bigger, the better, and the more points.
To earn other points, you can connect roads and complete them. This means paths begin in a town or in front of a kingdom and end definitively in front of each or create a circular path. That point scale shifts from two points to one point for completed roads. Completed roads can get complicated when you run into an opponent’s land or simply open points for an opponent to claim the road. There’s always a risk and there is always a strategy, even when it’s simple. Again, same deal, you can count each tile that makes up that road to equal out to whatever points, then move your character on the score sheet up that many points. Eventually, you will reach a certain number of points on the score sheet and win the game. Or lose it. It all depends on your strategy and building skills.
All of this is simple and easy to get into. I think it took my wife and me a whopping single hour to understand and play through an entire game. The game wasn’t built like Catan so that it takes multiple hours to complete, rather it was built to be quick and easy, and most of all fun. For that set of accomplishments, it’s a full success. We got into it and will probably take it with us on trips to pass the time here and there. We know how to play, it’s easy to understand and hard to forget.
Now, if you get more than two people involved in this game, you’re in for a dramatic shift. Kelly and I discussed this after our first game, saying it was much easier for a one-on-one session to happen. Once you get up to five people playing, you’re going to need a huge table and a ton of patience. Or a nice, stiff drink. Either way, you’re in for a good time.
The real joy of this game, especially with the maximum amount of people, is strategizing how you build out your land and how big you can make items before you need to wrap it up and move on. The slower you are with building usually means the more risk you’re taking with your opponent making smaller, easier decisions that equal out to more points. For such a simple game, it’s thick with strategic elements that make the experience a bit deeper than you might expect. Regardless, the game is stimulating, fun, and easily repeatable when you’re looking to hang out and not take life Catan-serious.
Any faults?
Not really. The game is simple. It’s easy to pick up and go. There is some strategy to it, but nothing that will weigh your brain down. Again, it’s not Catan, but I can see how it would complement that type of gameplay design. Carcassonne is simple as it is nearly perfect. I think when you do add more people that does change the speed and strategy of the gameplay significantly, but not in a bad way. It just becomes bigger and more, but still maintains its simplistic structure.
Conclusion
I enjoyed my brief time with Carcassonne. I needed a game that was just a pickup-and-go type of experience. It delivers with simplicity and justifiably complicates its process with strategy. This is one board game I will play for a long, long time.
