Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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91 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You'll never ger bored of this board game, 8 Dec 2004
Durability:5.0 out of 5 stars Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars Educational:3.0 out of 5 stars
A friend of mine introduced me to Carcassone last year and it's spread like wildfire amongst my family & friends. The basic premise is that players take it in turn to pull map tiles out of a bag and place them like a jigsaw so that features such as roads, rivers, fields and cities grow. Any unclaimed feaure can be claimed by placing one of your characters on the tile, and you get points for each completed feature. There's a bit more strategy to it than that, but the basic game is very accessible, playable after 5 minutes rules, and the expansions really add to your options so that you can play as complex or as simple rules as you like (or as time allows).Typically a game lasts about an hour with 5 people, and I can't recommend it strongly enough. If you're considering buying any board game, you won't go far wrong with this one.
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88 of 90 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A worthwhile distraction, 28 Dec 2004
By A Customer
Durability:4.0 out of 5 stars Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars Educational:3.0 out of 5 stars
Carcassonne is a family strategy game in which you build up a landscape of roads, cities and cloisters from a set of printed tiles.The box suggests it is suitable for age 10 and above but it certainly didn't bore any of the adults so there is no upper limit. It can be played by 2-5 people. Playing with 4 we found it took about 45 minutes to complete a game. The rules are simple but for once we found it was a game that the more we played it the more we enjoyed it. The fact that you turn over a tile so everyone can see it, and then decide where to place it, allows others to help or suggest alternative courses of play - so everyone can learn the game together as they play. Wooden "people" markers can be placed on one of the four types of landscape (fields, cities, roads or cloisters) and these people become farmers, knights, thieves or monks respectively. Scoring is based on the size of city "owned" by your knight, length of road controlled by your thief and so on. Our set included the "river expansion" which starts the same off with some additional tiles and makes the playing area less cramped, but you'll need to make plenty of space on the dining table once you get into it! It wins perhaps the ultimate accolate in that it distracted us from the television for most of Christmas Day and everyone was keen to resume play on Boxing Day.
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83 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the most enjoyable games I have ever played., 25 Mar 2008
Durability:4.0 out of 5 stars Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars Educational:4.0 out of 5 stars
I've been playing this game now for several years, since it first came out. The game won the German Game Of The Year award, in 2001. I should point out at this point that German board games are considered to be some of the best in the world, as such this is a very high accolade, which the game very much deserves.
I believe that there are two main reasons why this game is so deserving of its Game Of The Year Award: The first of these being that the basic rules of the game are very easy to learn. The second is that despite being easy to learn the rules, mastering the game will take a bit longer, and the randomness prevents a single tactic from becoming a guaranteed win, thus maintaining a more level playing field for games consisting of both experienced and inexperienced players.
Despite being similar, every game that I have played has had a different feel to it. This, I expect, is due to the random nature of the drawing of the tiles. This randomness does not, however, impart a feeling of lack of control; each tile drawn generally has multiple options where it may be placed, a decision that rests firmly with the player.
The choice of location is part of the educational aspect of the game, that of strategy. The player must weigh up the pro's and con's of short-term or long-term gain. This requires a level of mathematical calculation, and needs to be coupled with an element of risk-taking (gambling on the tile(s) needed both being available in the future and actually being the choice of that player). Even then, it may be necessary for a player to recalculate where they wish to play the tile if it does come to them; the situation may have changed through the tactics used by the other players.
Having owned the game for a good half-dozen years, and having used it often I can say that the tiles are wearing well. Despite being made of card the tiles are proving to be quite resilient, even though my tiles are regularly jumbled up in the bag which came with the second expansion. The only word of caution that I feel it is necessary to give is that although the bag is exceedingly useful for running the game it does start to get a bit full with all of the expansion tiles!
There are many expansions available for this game. The rules for each of them are relatively simple, although they will add a great deal to think about. A word of caution here, some some confusion could result the first time all of the expansions are used together. This is because there are increasing options available to a player once they take and place a tile, and the Dragon Flies tiles actually interrupt the game play; so the players have to remember where to carry on from.
If you like the game but think that it is over too quickly or does not provide sufficient tactical thought, then the way ahead is definitely to get one or more of the expansions. Each expansion will add about 30-45 minutes of time to the overall time required to play the game. Playing with the first four expansions, two copies of the Rivers II expansion, the Count of Carcasssonne, and two copies of the King and Bandit results in games that can take up to five hours to play.
One final comment, the game play changes depending on the number of players. This is not a critism, a two-player game is just as enjoyable as a six player game, it is just a different experience; this actually makes the game more appealing, because if you play it with a different number of players each time you have more variety. That said, there would be nothing wrong with playing the game with the same two people every time. Note, you must have the first expansion to be able to play a six-player game.
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