The main assignment here was to play the game together with a group to later on analyze the mechanics and assemble it all together in this report. My group contained of seven people and we chose to try this game as it was said to be one easiest one to understand and to play, comparing to the other games we looked at.
Carcassonne is a turn based board game where players compete against each other in order to complete lands with the help of different tiles (game board tiles, a brick to build roads, cities etc.). Each player builds the map with the help of randomly picked tiles to complete parts of the world and try to gather as much points as they can. To receive points a player have to place a piece (or a “follower”) strategically on a tile and depending on where one places his follower would determine how much points the player would receive after completing a “road” or a castle”. Placing a follower in a city makes it a “rider”. Placing a follower on a road makes it a bandit, completing a road would also give the player standing on the road some points. You can also put farmers on the “grass” (green areas on a tile), these points will be counted at the end of the game, this is due to the reason that the players need to see how much land is completed around the “farmer” giving the player points for every completed road or castle. Placing a follower on a cloister tile will make it a monk. Carcassonne is a game of a lot of risk and reward, where you may have to share lands to complete your own tiles, the tiles can’t be put everywhere either, every tile has to have the correspondent land, road or city to fit.
Gameplay
The game contains 72 tiles total, and all the tiles are face down and shuffled over the table, one tile will start the game and contain a single terrain (this one starts face up). For every turn a player picks up a face down tile and places it in a way where it has to connect together with the other tiles. Connecting roads together, cities to cities and fields to fields.
For every new tile placed, a player can add a follower to claim any points if it connects to others and gets completed, but at the same time these tiles can be shared if another player has put their follower in the same “feature”.
The game ends when the last tile has been placed, all the tiles with the followers will be counted and given a score for it, the player with the most score wins the game.
The points will be different during game play and at the end game. There is also some tiles that has a “Shield” icon on them (I believe they call them pennants) where a player can get extra points from. The only followers that don’t get their points counted are the farmers, where their points get counted when the game ends.
Every point received will be counted on a separate game board. For every city completed during play you get two points per tile + two points per pennant, at game end you get only one point per tile + one point per pennant. For every road tile you get one point, the Cloisters give you one point + one point for each of the surrounding tiles, max point for a cloister would be a total of nine points.
Best sides
The game is not as advanced as it would seem, it’s pretty easy to learn. It promotes social interactions between players, discussing what would be the best move to make, scheming and planning.
Starting a new game would not be repetitive as the map would always be randomized, where the player chooses how to build the board, depending on what kind of tile the player picks up.
The freedom of choice; You can choose how you want to build, the different variations often turns to new possibilities and opportunities which one has to take advantage of.
The excitement; The hope for the right tile to show up in order to complete the area that is being worked on, and the hope that your opponents don’t gain that tile brings excitement.
The creation of new roads and cities are to be considered artistic.
Hard to win big, the winner will not be announced until the end of the game, showing the player progression, and there will not be a looser until the very end (in other words; no one dies).
Bad sides
The game should have a timer as some players tend to take far more time than needed and thus turning the board game into a bore game. With the help of a timer each player should be given a set time limit so that the game can proceed without delay.
The name of the board game does not tell us anything about the game, also a difficult name to remember. I took it upon me to research the name just to get a better understanding of the creators idea, it turned out that it was named after the city of Carcassonne in south of France “famed for its city walls”. This would still not help me to remember the name of the game, if I would have wanted to recommend it to a friend. If the name was chosen for the medieval castle there this would be a bit far-fetched. In my opinion there are a lot more popular names one could have used for this board game, but I guess that this could be up to discussion.
Target group
The target group is 8+, at first it looked like a children’s game but after playing for a while one could understand that it would need some planning and understanding of the rules. The good thing about this game is that anyone can play it, if playing with family and having younger players, you can help them out but at the same time not risking your own gameplay. In Carcassonne it’s also pretty difficult to win big as every player will gather their own score. Out of the five rounds we played the difference in score wasn’t that great, even if we had people that had past experience with the game.
Conclusion
The most interesting function in this game would be the establishment and sabotage, at the first game rounds where we needed to learn the rules and understand the mechanics everything started out friendly, putting tiles together and claiming territories without any bigger conflicts made the game a bit easy going, but as soon as people started to settle in with the rules everything started to change. Careful planning and discrete takeovers was a game changer, it wasn’t that friendly anymore, but it also brought a lot of laughter when others did not manage to gather the points intended.
After playing the game I can now strongly recommend Carcassonne to my peers, the combination of the rules, the map building with the help of tiles is something out of the ordinary. A joyful experience for someone like me that have not played these kinds of board games (I have mostly been playing Backgammon) and was not fond of them before. The thing that intrigued me the most was the tile design for this game, the way that these 72 tiles have been put together to make it possible for players to build different maps for every new game they start, never make it feel repetitive and always gives the player a randomized map and forces the player to come up with new strategies to try get the highest score and win the game.
Playing these rounds and also observing the others play (as we could only play five players at a time), I was thinking of new possibilities to gather more points and playing it safe. I managed to see that in this game one can try to be manipulative and lure the players to make certain moves with some good arguments. But that would also be a difficult thing to do as the others would call out your bluff (or scheme). Playing with people that have played this before I managed to pick up some moves they made during the game, picking up a tile you could not use for your own gain left the option to instead sabotage for the other players by placing your tile in a way that your opponent would not be able to finish his city etc.
Even though the tiles are randomized it does not change the fact that one can memorize the tiles, this can turn out to be to your advantage, but mostly only at late game, if you are close to complete a city and you know that there are a small chance for you to complete it, then you should go for a more safe option and try to gather your last points in a different way, even though they are single points.
At the last game rounds we played, we added the river expansion to the game, just to try it out. This did not add that much extra to the game, I think that this expansion made insignificant differences, as it mostly provided with a few extra tiles of land. So for the expansion part I did not see it as something necessary to add to the game.
Time limit is something that should be added to the game, as I grew tired of waiting for other players to make a move, waiting for them to decide where to place their tile made me impatient and in the end I just wanted it to be over. Something I think that one can add to the game or buy, is an hour glass as an extra feature to the game. With that you could shorten a game by a lot and avoid players getting bored in the process.
Playing this game several times gives you the possibilities to think and rethink, this is a good thing as it opens the mind and teaches you to quickly rethink every strategy you had so far and come up with a new one. Concluding this report I would like to say that this was a nice experience and also an amusing gameplay.
A Student Game Design Blog - By Ahmad Ali 
Hi Ash!
I agree with you on a lot of things that you have written here. Carcassonne is probably one of the simplest games we could’ve chosen thanks to it’s easy to follow rules and simple and few systems. It is probably also one of the most fun games as well and the simplicity might add to that. Instead of spending 45 min on reading rulebooks (i.e. the swamp that is Drakborgen) you can basically jump straight into it without getting tired of the game before it has started.
If you would barely look at the game’s systems and mechanics you would see probably an embarrassingly simple game with few objects. But as you point out in the “Best Sides” section, there is a lot of fun dynamics created from the simplicity of the game where most of the mechanics are mentioned in the rulebook and not as a separate representation in a deck of cards for example. The freedom of placing a tile basically where ever you would like gives you the opportunity build your cities and roads how every you like, to create alliances with the other players, backstab them, etc. This system creates such different dynamics without being a separate deck of cards or the like. But it’s dynamic result, other than just “I’m placing a tile”, is something that people probably forget to think about when they analyze the game!
The first time we played the game (we played it with the River expansion) there was an all-out war for the fields! The cities and roads became secondary and everyone was plotting on how to gain the majority on the fields and interfere with the plans of the other players. This strategy gave us huge fields and eventually one player (I, of course) gained the majority and won big time! So as you’ve written it is hard to win big, but it’s not impossible. If everyone is focusing on one of the point systems and which everyone is can try to take part in then there is a chance to gain a lot of points and rob your friends from theirs.
As for the worst sides I also agree with the timer. This is not necessarily something I would blame on the game as I feel that it is the player’s “fault” for being cautious resulting in him or her taking a long time to plan his or her move. But I think that this is probably something that happens in almost every round of the game so an hourglass could come to use here. Whether the creators should include one or that the players should take it upon themselves to use some sort of timer. We experienced some “buffer time” as we were nearing the end of our game sessions, so we all took a tile when it was actually one or two players ahead of us which gave us some time to plan out our move. These plans could of course be shattered if the players ahead of you decided to place a tile which interrupted your plans. This method bent the rules a bit but it worked fairly well since we all got a little more time to plan which resulted in some interesting moves.
Thanks to the simplicity, the target group is really wide and everyone can probably play it. The game is about strategy, so if we were to break it down even further the target group could also be “people who enjoy strategy and party games”. But since the game also relies so heavily on the social aspect, your explanation is well enough I think.
The establishment and sabotage function is definitely the most interesting. But it only becomes interesting if more than one player is actually utilizing it and this is probably one of the “problems” with the freedom of the game. If all of the players are a just focusing on their own little piece of the map and not really interacting (or interfering) with the other players, this function is rendered useless. Without the game somehow “forcing” the players’ paths to cross, it is not always certain that this function will occur. So if you would want a session of Carcassonne with a lot of backstabbing and alliances, you would have to rely on the other people being just as engaged as you are.
I don’t really know what the core system of the game would be if not maybe the “tile placement”? The players are only performing two actions on the board (if we don’t count the movement in the scorecard, which frankly is not a system and rather just a score counter); placing a tile and placing an avatar marker. The avatars are only placed if the player wants to claim that road, field or city. The tiles are always placed at each turn of the game and they are what make the game move forward. Without the tiles there would be no way of gaining points or even play the game, so it probably should be the core system.
During this assignment we only played with the River expansion, but I have played the “standard” Carcassonne once before and I got to say that I think that the River expansion is adding to the game. Even though the tiles make the game’s layout random, the river adds even further to that and it makes the initial planning a bit trickier. With that said it is not a game changer though! Once everyone has started to build and you are a few rounds in, everything is turned back to normal and strategies can continue. The river is not adding any mechanics or systems to the game and is simple there to “mix things up a bit” from the standard edition.
All in all, I agree with your analysis about one of the more pleasant games on the list! Hope you guys had fun with Drakborgen which surely is the complete opposite when it comes to simplicity.