Carcassonne is a tile-based strategy board game that sees players compete to build the best cities, roads and farms. It was designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede and has spawned many expansions and spin-offs, and several PC, console and mobile versions. This board game is suitable for ages seven and above and can be played by 2 to 5 players. It is available to buy from Esdevium store finder or on Amazon.
Carcassonne is named after the medieval fortified town of Carcassonne in southern France, famed for its city walls. Inside the box, it comes with 72 Land tiles, 12 River tiles, 40 meeples, 5 abbots, scoreboard and instructions. The tiles are well made with thick cardboard and no sharp corners. The design on the tiles are beautifully printed. The meeples and abbots are made from small coloured wooden pieces. I love that inside the box, it comes with a printed background with slots for you to place your pieces and tiles neatly.
When we first opened up the game, we thought that this was going to be a very complicated game to play with young children. But it is not really. They all in fact enjoyed plotting their own cities and learned to incorporate some game strategy. There are a number of ways of playing this and we chose to play the simplified version as this was our first time.
It was very straightforward and planning couldn’t be much simpler! This game requires a large table to play as there are 84 tiles and you play them all. Each player gets their own chosen 8 meeples and 1 abbot (black, yellow, blue, red and green colour) coloured pieces. Then we placed the abbots on the scoreboard.
This game is all about strategy and planning with the tile that was drawn for you. If some of the routes are blocked by other players, you have to plot another route hoping to build your cities/road to score points. We love this game because it is fun and challenging. No wonder it has sold more than 10 million copies and expansions! I would definitely recommend it!
Disclosure: We received the sample for the purposes of writing this review however all thoughts and opinions remain our own. We have included an Amazon affiliate link to the product. If you click on this and buy, we may earn a small commission.