I played a game of Two Rooms and a Boom with someone who had to sit in silence for the entire game. Unsurprisingly they never played it again.
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I’ve had this burning question - can people explain to me why they like Carcassonne?
I’ve had my copy for over 20 years. Originally bought because of a) the reputation and b) the player count. Settlers (of Catan) was constraining with its strict 3-4 (5-6 was never as good) so I liked something I could play at 2.
First game was really… boring, I guess. Two player. Over the years I’ve had sporadic plays - in person, online, with the app. I’ve had two that were exciting (one where we both knew one player was desperately trying to finish this giant Cathedral city, so breath was held at every draw - he finished it on the second to last tile and we tied) and one that was just interesting for reasons I don’t remember.
Most other games I’ve been able to “resolve” - Dominion had a terrible first game but years later it clicked. Oh My Goods I never liked but after 5 plays or so I could see what people liked about it and specifically why I didn’t. Scythe and Nations as well, seems like there was no “game” there after the first play but something pulled me back and, in a few plays, I found the handles.
Carcassonne still baffles me. I don’t get what it is supposed to be.
So, for those of you who like it:
- What thoughts / decisions are going through your head when you draw a tile? On other players’ turns?
- What is “the game” that you’ve found, either on the table and above it?
- What’s the best part?
Paul Dean once said he played this every day on his tablet. Quinns recommended it as one of the two best games for introduction to the hobby (in the El Dorado review). I’m very ok with deciding a game isn’t for me, but some part of me craves to understand why?
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I think the key components for Carcassonne are:
- Simple action menu, which simplifies the decision making process and streamlines the game
- Shared space, which creates tension
- Pastoral setting, which attracts gamers that may have otherwise not paid attention to board gaming because of how pervasive combat, fighting and violence are in so many gaming media.
Does that make it a great game? No. But it’s approachable and offers a little bit of interesting decisions without requiring a great deal of brain-power commitment.
For me, it’s in the category of “good enough Euro”. I won’t go out of my way to play it, but I’d sit down for a game with some friends if someone was looking to get it on the table.
As for why Praul played it daily on his tablet… well, I think he’s a hopeless romantic for anything pastoral, and I’m guessing it offered him a bit of escape.
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I agree with @pillbox
For me the decision point is can I use this tile to stuff my opponent or better my position?
As you’re drawing every tile even the small expansions can change the gameplay somewhat.
It gets worse the more players involved. I once played a 6 player game and it was terrible.
I don’t know what version of the rules you’ve played but I was surprised when the new rules includes farmers as an optional advanced rule. Without that there’s barely a game IMO
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I should also add that we play the variant where you start with a tile. On your turn, you play the only tile you have, and then finish your turn by drawing a tile. This is a common variant (official now, I think?) that helps streamline the game further by letter people think about what they are going to do with their tile while others are taking their turn.
Additionally, I would never want to play with more than 4.
I, too, am surprised by this. Farmers are about the only really interesting decision to make and, without them, I think I’d rather play just about anything else, including “Roll a 6: win a cookie”
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I have heard that the meaner you play the more interesting it is. But in my experience, trying to “steal” features is a high risk, low reward endeavor. Sharing can work, but functions better if you have at least 4 players.
One friend, who loved the game, didn’t know the correct rules until we played together. He’d always thought it was open season on meeple placement and feature stealing, that you could just plop anyone into someone else’s city at any time, etc. It was interesting and I’ve since wondered if that is a houserule that would transform the game (positively). Or maybe just the big double-meeple, like a Grande, counts as one but can be used to share/steal indiscriminately.
My version has the original Farmer rules which were hell to explain and ruined it as a gateway. But I still get a little fuzzy on how farmers score after all the adjustments. I guess this is just one more.
(edit: what I wrote made no sense to me so I fixed it)
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Not a bad game. I end up preferring Carc’s other spin-offs. Carcassonne: the City is my fave atm.
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I think for me it’s just how chill it is. Like, there’s barely any decisions to make (we play base game with the river and nothing else, not even the farms).
Sometimes it has its place: Like, we introduced our 5-year-old nephew to games using it. Our 13-year-old niece has anxiety (severe) and Carc is one of the few non-medical things that can get her out of that spiral. It’s just… nice.
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I enjoy the app as a time waster. I play with The River, The Abbot, and Inns & Cathedrals. The aggressive AI will snipe your cities, roads, and farms, if you aren’t careful, but you can also bait their meeples into traps.
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My hurdle with Carcassonne is that to get better, it seems I would need to memorise the odds of various tile shapes appearing, and that sounds too tiresome to engage with.
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That’s why I always use the function in the app that tells me how many of a given tile are still left. Is it cheating? Maybe, but I’m only playing against the AI, so I don’t care. 
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I think Carcassonne is a revolution compared to Catan, but it’s just a really strong stepping stone.
One of the reasons is that it is pretty good across the entire player count. I’ve played with 6 many, many times and it’s surprisingly spirited, and with 2 it’s tense and strategic. You can be a jerk, you can ignore everyone else, you can be helpful and actually assist other players (the “Builders” expansion helps with this). And, critically, it’s almost half the price of other “classic” board games of its weight (Carcassonne sells for $40CAD, while Catan is $60, TTR is $60, 7 Wonders is $55… Sushi Go is cheaper at $26 for the 8-player party edition, but I also think it’s a great “next step” game).
It’s not complicated, but there is depth. There are no dice so your decisions “feel” more meaningful. And it’s really not complicated, which I know I’ve already said, but it and Splendor are so simple that I can actually explain the entire rule set to customers who are curious.
I don’t think it’s truly great, but it’s a solid 7 out of 10 for almost everyone. And that’s kinda nice.
That stated, there is no such thing as a game that everyone will like. And some of the expansions are better or worse depending on your play group.
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I’ve been meaning to answer this.
Have a look at the year Carcassonne was published. We were fresh from the 90s where euros were a bit more interactive than these days.
So the way this was played among my friend-circle back then (and also the reason I no longer play Catan) is that you would take any opportunity to block someone or do anything to mess with their plans. This means runining their chances of making the meadow bigger, placing tiles in such ways they could never score a city or close a road and obviously try and get into the same city or meadow as someone else or even better get in with the double meeple or just one more and take their points away. One of my friends to this day gets called out as “Wiesenleger” when she is being overly competitive in a game 
(Wiese = Meadow, legen = lie down, because you will put your meeple on the side in the meadow). If you don’t take every chance of blocking others, are you even playing? That’s how Catan was played but in Catan you just aren’t in the game at some point and you know it. Carcassonne usually isn’t that obvious because that huge city could–in theory–still score.
And then pigs entered the game… and it got… worse 
In any case, I still enjoy playing a game on the app every once in a while because the way tile placement and pattern matching/completion works in this game is somehow quite satisfying. I am not very good at it these days. I think it holds up far better than a lot of games from the era because it is so incredibly simple and it has this amount of interaction built in. I will probably not propose playing it but I would play if someone asked for it.
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One thing I think carcasonne adds is this collective building aspect. You can end the game with your friends having constructed this nice, almost, giant piece of art together with this where’s Wally like narrative weaved through it - oh I can’t believe you placed that building like that and sniped my majority - or whatever.
It’s very much a thing of it’s time though and i think in a culture that is always about new stuff all the time it can have its oldness accelerated by a jaded crowd looking for the next new hit.
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