Carcassonne has been winning people over for almost 20 years now, an incredible achievement in the tabletop hobby, especially with so many great new titles released each year. Today Meeple Mountain writers and Carcassonne addicts David McMillan and Andrew Holmes discuss just what it is that makes Carcassonne so great and keeps them coming back for more. The game of Carcassonne begins with a simple mechanical framework that everything else is built upon.
So before one can begin to dissect and discuss just what it is about this game that makes it so essential, it is critical to understand how it plays: click on the banner below for a brief overview if required.
Players are tasked with placing these meeples onto randomly drawn tiles in order to score points. The tile being placed can be rotated in any direction so long as the placement of the tile follows these simple rules: roads must connect to roads, fields must connect to fields, and city pieces must connect to city pieces.
Then any feature completed by the placement of the tile scores. Roads score 1 point for each tile that makes up the road. Cities score 2 points for each tile that makes up the city. Once completely surrounded by tiles, a monastery will score 1 point for itself plus a point for each surrounding tile — 9 points.
Fields score a bit differently than the other features and are only scored at the end of the game once the last tile has been placed. A field is made up of any tiles that share the same pasture land, unbroken by other features. Once the final tile has been placed the players count up the meeples in each field. If one opponent has more meeples in that field than any other, they score for that field alone. Otherwise the score is shared by the players with the most meeples there.
