About the Boardgame
Carcassonne is a tile-based board game in a medieval setting created by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede and published by Hans im Glück. The official rules can be found here: Part 1, Part 2. The board game is named after the medieval fortified town of Carcassonne in southern France, famed for its city walls. A new edition, with updated artwork on the tiles and the box, was released in 2014. However, many people, including myself, prefer the original design, as seen below.
For a very brief 3-minute introduction, you can watch this great video!
The Carcassone board forms a medieval landscape with castles, roads, and more built by the players as the game progresses. The game starts with a single terrain tile face up, and 71 others shuffled face down in the tile stack for the players to draw from. On each turn, a player draws a new tile and places it adjacent to tiles on the board. The new tile must be placed in a way that extends features on all the tiles it touches: roads must connect to roads, fields to fields, and cities to cities.
After placing a new tile, the active player can place a meeple on his newly placed tile. He can claim features like castles, roads, monasteries, and fields. However, he must not claim any features of the tile that extend or connect features already claimed by another player. However, it is possible for separate terrain features by opposing players to become shared by placing a tile so that it connects the features. For example, two separate fields, claimed by two players, can connect into a single field by placing a tile in a gap between them.
If a feature (not including fields) is finished during the game, it scores the player with the most meeples on it a certain number of points. Castles are completed when all sides are enclosed by castle walls, meaning an open castle has no direct border to an empty spot on the board. Roads are finished when all ends are closed, for example, by ending in a village. Monasteries are finished when eight tiles surround them. Field features are only scored at the end of the game. Features score points as follows:
| Feature | Completed During the Game | Scored at the End of the Game |
|---|---|---|
| City | 2 points per tile + 2 per emblem | 1 point per tile + 1 per emblem |
| Road | 1 point per tile | 1 point per tile |
| Monastery | 9 points (1 tile + 8 surrounding tiles) | 1 point + 1 per surrounding tile |
| Fields | not scored during the game | 3 points for each completed city bordering the field |
The game ends when the last tile has been placed. At that time, all unfinished features (including fields) score points for the players with the most meeples. The player with the most points wins the game.