Carcassonne: The Castle

This is a stand-alone, two-player only variant of the very popular game Carcassonne. Many diehard fans of the original have expressed themselves to be less-than-enamoured with this offering from gaming guru Reiner Knizia : see many of the comments on the game at the boardgamegeek.com website for illustration.

Play is very simple. A jigsaw-sectioned wall is laid out on the table, which serves as both a scoring track and boundary for play - the city wall of Carcassonne. Each player takes their turn drawing a square tile from the facedown stack, which they must place either at one of a small number of allowed starting points along the wall, or else adjoining another tile already played. Each tile shows either open courtyard, the roofs of houses, the battlemented tops of castles, pathways through the city, or a combination of any of all four. Unlike in the original game where road must join road, city join city, meadow join meadow, etc, the only restriction on where tiles may adjoin is that a pathway must always connect to a pathway - otherwise, any side of a tile may adjoin any other.

This leads to one of the main criticisms of the game from seasoned players of the original - that there is too much freedom over placement. In practice. From my own experience, at any rate, the truth of the matter is rather subtler. Because a player is restricted by the walls, the pathways and of course strategic consideration of both players' previous plays, choosing where to place can be an agonizing decision.

In addition to the playing of a tile, on their turn a player may also choose to place one of their supply of small wooden men - "meeples" as they fondly known to the gaming community. As buildings and pathways are completed, meeples score points for their master. Again, strategic considerations abound : should you commit all your meeples to as many buildings as possible, hoping to build them as big as possible (making sure the are completed) before the end of the game? How many should you place to score from courtyards and Market stalls? How many should you hold back to score "one-tiler" opportunity points and as insurance against your opponent shoe-horning in on your turf?

Each player marks the largest town house they build as their "palace" at the end of the game, the player with the largest palace scores bonus points equal to the largest area of empty spaces in the city. So, if you find yourself falling behind in the palace-building, you might instead try and carve-up all the large open spaces - much to the annoyance of your rival.

Finally, there are also hidden bonus tiles placed along the score track - if by chance or design a player can land his marker on one of the tiles at the end of his turn, he can earn one of a number of handy multipliers and bonuses that just might earn him the winning edge.

My experience is that these elements make the game interestingly different from the original, and I suspect that this is the version that I actually prefer. What I haven't yet mentioned, and what may well be the deciding factor in my case (shallow person that I am) is that this version of Carcassonne is beautiful to look at, being very charmingly illustrated : some of the tiles have peasants and soldiers engaged in various activites, including somebody riding a pig. How can you not love a game that shows a little dude riding a pig?