Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsPretty good, but requires alteration of rules to qualify as strategy
Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2017
This game is way easier to start playing and enjoying vs something like Catan, where new players need a 45min rule reading pow-wow before you begin playing, then 10-20mins of setting the board up, and then 2-3 playthroughs for most before everyone is comfortable with the rules and starts to form ideas about strategy. You can explain basic Carcassone entirely in 10 minutes and begin playing with everyone getting the idea almost immediately, as well as the strategy after 1 playthrough. It's fun, easy, and less adversarial and contentious than many games.
Now here is where the issue lies. While the changing gameboard adds a lot of replay value, the more important part of replay value for any strategy type of board game in my opinion, the promise of besting your opponents by honing your strategy, is not there at all... at least not with the standard rules. The problem (and thus the fix) is fairly simple: the rules regarding the end of game (when you run out of pieces) have everyone count up all the points for their partially complete structures and add them to their total points. Additionally, most of the point values are the same for sections of incomplete structures as their completed counterparts. In my opinion this is a big mistake, because it takes away the entire element of strategy regarding what sorts of structures you should attempt to complete, deciding how ambitious you want to be in certain areas of the board based on how much time you have to complete them and the likelihood of getting certain pieces in that remaining time.
When you take that away, I'd say 60% of the strategy goes out the window, and it becomes this almost moot decision of where to put your piece each turn, with no consequences down the road for being overzealous. You still have to be observant enough to find the 3-4 spots you could realistically place your piece, and pick the best one for you that maximizes points. However, picking the best one is almost moot when the points for incomplete sections are the same for many features. It almost doesn't matter where you put it because finishing the feature functionally doesn't matter, so you just place them wherever they fit in a way that you can claim something and not give opponents points, a decision that is very easy. Add to this that you have enough meeples (how you claim points) to place them haphazardly on every turn usually without ever running out in 4+ person games (even in some 3 person games) and the opportunities to outwit opponents are nearly nonexistent.
The effect is that since the decisions are so basic and their outcomes so similar, everyone typically makes the same decisions and the gap between more strategy-minded players and others closes to almost nothing, at which point the winner is dictated more by chance / luck of drawing good pieces than anything else. In our last game the same player pulled 4-5 monasteries, almost in a row, which is basically an auto-win even without finishing any single one. This makes it more analogous to Parcheesi than Catan / Chess / etc. That may be more fun for some groups that include younger kids, in that it gives them a shot to win, but at the cost of making it much less interesting for adults.
Now for the fix: disregard the points being allocated at the end and nobody gets points for anything incomplete. Doing this takes the game from 1.5 stars to something approaching 4 stars, thus my rating of 3/5 overall. Of course modifying the rules of a game to make it better cheapens the experience, but it's an easy adjustment.
Overall a fun game, easy to start playing and requires almost no "setup," but even with the supplemental rules/tiles the strategy component lacks.
