F$@& Carcassonne

Carcass1

Plot:  Build walled cities in southern France.   The theme fits…almost.   The art is good but the scoring and play mechanics can be transferred to another setting pretty easily.

Mechanics:  A tile laying game.  Draw a tile, examine it, and play it legally.  Legality is very straight forward.  A city side must connect to another city side or be open, similarly with roads and fields.  Upon placement of the tile, you may drop a meeple onto one of the terrain features (the field, the abbey, the city or the road).  Once the road/city/abbey is completely closed in that meeple scores and returns to your supply.  You can’t play a competing meeple into the same area as an opponents, but you can place one in a position that eventually you’ll share scoring.  Meeples score like this:

Knights : Upon closing a city, a knight gets 2 VP per tile and shield (shields are printed on selected city tiles) the city contains.  Very small cities, or cities that required only 2 tiles to score are an exception.  These count as 2 VP total.   Uncompleted cities get 1 VP per tile and shield at the end of the game.

Robbers :  Robbers play on roads, and upon closing you get 1 VP per road length.  At end of game you still get 1 VP per uncompleted road tile.

Monks:  A monk scores when every tile surrounding an abbey (9 total) scores.  The 1-1 VP ratio for uncompleted abbeys is the same as roads.

Farmers:  Farmers score at the end of the game.  For every uncompleted city in the farmer’s zone of control, you score 3 VPs.

Tactics:  It usually comes down to farmers.  Occasionally a player will close a crap load of cities to get wicked awesome scoring for knights, but even then, that guy probably still scored at least a few farms.  So pay attention to the zone break points (roads mostly) and work to extend your zone and thwart other peoples.

Review:  A two part review here.  This is among my favorite gateway games.   If I am introducing board games to n00bs or family, this will absolutely be my go to choice.  It’s simple to teach and after just a few rounds n00bs can get a feel for tactics.  My family will remain clueless for the games entirety.  As a teaching game this rates 9/10.  Amongst nerdcore gamers, I despise this game.  As soon as someone actually tries hard to win, the pacing bogs way the hell down.  And the game isn’t nearly deep enough to justify 15 minute waits between turns.  Nerdcore rating : 4/10.