gamergirl

My husband and I got the game Carcassone from a truly awesome friend as a wedding present. It’s a strategy board game where you lay tiles to create what looks like a map of a medieval countryside. You place pieces to control this growing countryside, but you have a limited number you can have on the board at any one time. The bigger a feature being guarded by your piece grows, the more points you’ll score.

Its first and foremost virtue in my mind is that you can play it and have fun with a varying number of people. It’s built for 2-5 players, and while “best” strategy changes as you add more people, the enjoyability of the game doesn’t increase or decrease significantly. This is a welcome change from many games–Risk comes to mind–where the number of players the box claims you can play includes a lot more numbers than the game is actually fun with. With Risk having too few players takes a lot of the balance and strategy out of the game. With, say, History of the World, playing with the maximum number of players can make it take forever. A game just isn’t as much fun when a third of the people you’re playing with wander off to do something else in the half-hour between their turns. Carcassone’s a different sort of beast, however. No one has ever said, when we suggested playing it “No, we have too many for that to be fun” or “Nah, that game’s better with more people.”

If the game does have a flaw, it’s that once you learn it there’s an impulse to reintroduce the confusion and complexity the game had when you first started playing… However, I hear that there are multiple expansions to the game available, so I’ll have to let you guys know how those go when we check them out.

If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, I see that Amazon has Carcassone available for a little over $20 with super-saver shipping, so it’s not a big outlay to start playing.

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