Carcassone

Number of players: 2–5 Players
Playing time: 30–45 Min
Complexity: 1.88 / 5
Age: 7+

About the game
In Carcassonne, players create a medieval French landscape one tile at a time, building cities, roads, cloisters, and farms around the famous walled city of Carcassonne. Every tile placement changes the map and creates new opportunities to score—or disrupt an opponent’s plans.

On your turn, draw a landscape tile and place it so that roads connect to roads, cities connect to cities, and fields connect to fields. You may then place one of your followers, or meeples, on the tile as a knight in a city, thief on a road, monk in a cloister, or farmer in a field.

Complete features to score points and reclaim your meeples for later use. Cities and roads score when finished, cloisters score when surrounded by tiles, and farms score at the end of the game based on their connected completed cities. Because players have only a limited number of meeples, every placement requires careful timing: claim a new feature, help complete an existing one, or place a tile that makes an opponent’s scoring project more difficult.

When the final tile is placed, players score incomplete features and farms. The player with the most points wins. Carcassonne is a classic tile-placement strategy game that combines spatial planning, tactical competition, map building, and simple rules that appeal to both new and experienced players. It won the 2001 Spiel des Jahres award.