Carcassonne Tiles
Mandy Geise
The River adds a new way to set up and get started! To use the River, place the two-tile starting tile in your play area, and shuffle up the remaining River tiles. As mentioned earlier, shuffle the two end pieces and place them on the bottom of the stack.
To score gardens, treat them the same as monasteries (both complete and incomplete). As a bonus, if you did not place a meeple during the Place a Meeple step, you may instead immediately score your Abbot and return them to your supply. That monastery / garden is considered incomplete, for future tile effects.
Carcassonne (/ˌkɑːrkəˈsɒn/) is a tile-based German-style board game for two to five players, designed by Klaus-Jrgen Wrede and published in 2000 by Hans im Glck in German and by Rio Grande Games (until 2012) and Z-Man Games (currently)[2] in English.[3] It received the Spiel des Jahres[4] and the Deutscher Spiele Preis awards in 2001.
It is named after the medieval fortified town of Carcassonne in southern France, famed for its city walls. The game has spawned many expansions and spin-offs, and several PC, console, and mobile versions. A new edition, with updated artwork on the tiles and the box, was released in 2014.
The game board is a medieval landscape built by the players as the game progresses. The game starts with a single specific terrain tile face up and 71 others shuffled face down for the players to draw from. Each player's turn consists of three distinct phases:
If any feature (except a field) is completed during a player's turn, the score for the completed feature is counted for the player that controls that feature; after scoring, the controlling "meeple" is removed from the board and returned to the player's stock. Each player has eight followers; since one is used to keep track of the player's score, only seven can be in play at any moment.[6]
The game ends when the last tile has been placed. At that time, all incomplete features (including fields) score points for the players with the most followers on them. The player with the most points wins the game.[6]
There are two older editions of Carcassonne, differing in scoring of cities and fields. The current scoring rules were introduced in the German version in 2004, but until 2008, the first edition scoring rules were still included with the English releases of Carcassonne, third edition rules[9][10] are now included with all editions (including the Xbox 360 and travel versions), and are assumed by all expansions in all languages.
Consider sample game #2 on the 610 board. In this example, followers are stationed on the board according to the capital first letter of the color name: "R"ed, "Y"ellow, "G"reen, "B"lue, and "P"urple, where purple is substituted for "B"lack to avoid confusion with blue.
There are three completed cities at [C2]*[D2]*[C3]*[D3], [F1]*[E2]*[F2]*[F3] and [H2]*[I2]. It is not possible to complete the city at [G4]*[G5]*[G6]; by examination of the available tiles, there is no tile that will fit in [H5] to continue all four edges, which also means the city in [H6] cannot be completed.
Similarly, because any piece that can be placed in [E1] must continue the three bordering edges, that piece in [E1] will connect the two fields that are currently claimed by the green farmer in [G1] and the red farmers in [C2] and [D2] alongside the yellow farmers in [H4], [H1], and [J3]. If no one else adds a farmer, yellow would claim the field by having the most followers in that merged field. The other shared-field situation is the red farmer in [D4] sharing a field with one blue farmer in [G5]. However, if a tile is played at [F6], it will connect to the field to the southeast; even though blue would have two farmers in the merged field, including the farmer in [G6], and would control the merged field, that field still does not touch any completed cities and would score no points unless the city at [C6]*[D6]*[E6] is completed.
There are two fields that have been completed and enclosed by loop roads in [I1]+[I2]+[J2]+[J1] and [C3]+[D3]+[E3]+[F3]+[F4]+[E4]+[D4]+[C4]. Neither of these fields touch any completed cities and so they would each score zero points. The Green farmer in [C5] is at risk of being enclosed in a loop and cut off from any completed cities.
The three cloisters at [H3], [E5], and [F5] include stationed monks because they are not completely surrounded by eight tiles; the two cloisters that are surrounded, at [G3] and [D5], are vacant because the claiming player(s) have scored those points. A tile played at [F6] would complete the surroundings for the blue monks at [E5] and [F5], scoring eighteen points for those followers.
Red has one knight follower in [D1], two thief followers in [B3] and [C4], and three farmer followers in [C2], [D2], and [D4]; this means that Red has only one follower remaining that can be stationed unless the roads or city are completed to score and return those followers to their stock. In contrast, purple only has one monk follower on the board at [H3] at this time, but that monk is effectively stranded until the end of the game: there is no possible tile that can be played in [I3] as there are only two single-road tiles (with a cloister) and those are already on the board at [H3] and [D5]. However, that monk will score eight points (one for the cloister and seven for the surrounding tiles) at the end of the game. Worse, the green knight follower in [H6] will not score any points and is stranded because the city will never be completed. Yellow has three farmer followers, one knight [J4], and one thief [I5]; both the knight and thief remain active and can be returned by completing that city and road, respectively.
The original board game has 72 tiles with city, field, and road features; the River mini-expansion adds 12 tiles with river features. The version of the game currently in print includes the River and Abbot mini-expansions.
The river tiles are used as an alternative to the standard CRFR start tile and have the same dark-colored back to indicate this. The starting river tile is called the source (a river tile with a single river edge) and the final river tile is called the lake (again with a single river edge); players take turns placing all twelve river tiles to start the game, including follower placement and scoring, if relevant, then after the lake river tile has been played, proceed to place the remaining 71 terrain tiles.[8]
Krn used a four-character tile code which described the feature on each edge of the tile as either a road (R), meadow (M, aka field), or city (C), written clockwise from an arbitrary starting edge. For instance, CRMR (modified as CRFR to conform with the terminology of this article) would describe the starting tile, starting from the top edge. With three possibilities for each edge, theoretically there are 81 (=34) possible tile combinations, but as some are duplicates because the tiles may be rotated arbitrarily, there are actually 24 possible combinations.[11] Capaldi and Kolba, professors of mathematics at Valparaiso University, also counted 24 distinct types amongst the 71 non-river tiles of the starting set, although 5 of these were duplicates of other terrain tiles with the addition of pennant/coat of arms features. They assigned a single letter to each of the 24 types.[12]
Carcassonne is considered to be an excellent "gateway game" by many board game players[13] as it is a game that can be used to introduce new players to board games. In a 2017 Ars Technica holiday buyer's guide, it was described as "one of the absolutely foundational games of the modern board gaming hobby".[14]
The rules are simple, no one is ever eliminated, and the play is fast. A typical game, without any expansions, takes about 35 minutes to play. There is a substantial luck component to the game; however, good tactics greatly improve one's chances of winning. Examples of tactical considerations include:
Several official expansions for Carcassonne have been published, which add numerous additional rules, tiles and new kinds of figures. Together, they can more than double the length of the game. These expansions are generally compatible with each other and may be played together.
The first official Carcassonne World Championship was held at SPIEL in Essen, Germany, in 2006.[48] An annual world championship has been held at SPIEL every year since 2006 with the exceptions of the 2010 and the 2023 championships, which were held during SPIEL but at an alternate location in Herne, Germany; and the 2020 edition which was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[49] As a result of the cancelation of the 2020 World Championship, in the 2021 edition each country was allowed to participate with two players (except Romania, that was allowed to participate with three players including the 2019 champion Marian Curcan).[50]
As a result of the cancelation of World Championship in 2020, the community of Carcassonne Catalonia decided to create an online world championship for teams, to be played online for several weeks on the online platform Board Game Arena.[52] It is called the World Team Carcassonne Online Championship (WTCOC) and the Japanese team won the first edition. A second edition was played in 2021, and during this edition the publisher Hans Im Gluck and Spielzentrum made official their support for the championship.[53][54]
Carcassonne is a classic board game set in the pastoral south of France. You and the other players take turns picking tiles at random, which may contain parts of roads, cities, or other picturesque features. You must place your tile in a way that fits with the existing tiles on the board, and then you can use one of your little humanoid tokens (called Meeples, no, really) to claim one of those mentioned features. Completing a city or road with your Meeple on it earns you points, and so the goal of the game is to build bigger and smarter than your opponents to claim the most points.
I love the iconography of the old walled cities. It reminds me of some old Dungeon and Dragon maps. So I decided to combine those old style maps with the game of Carcassonne and made some deluxe tiles for the game.
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