Carcassone - The Board Game

Carcassonne, a German board game which came out in 2000 and is already considered a classic of the genre. It's a deceptively simple game, and great fun to play with a few of your friends.

Carcassonne takes its name from the fortified city in southern France, famous for its strategic location and oft-conquered land. The game focuses on developing the land around Carcassonne, as each player vies for control of roads, farms, cities and cloisters.

At its core, Carcassonne is a tile-laying game, challenging players to build the land to their advantage, and deploy their followers strategically. During a turn, a player draws a land tile, and places it down on the ever-growing map of the area. Each tile played must connect logically to the tiles surrounding it -- roads must continue, as must city walls and fields. Once the player places a tile, he or she then has the option of placing one of four kinds of followers on the land: a knight, a monk, a thief, or a farmer.

There's only one generic type of follower piece in Carcassonne, affectionately nicknamed a "meeple." Rather than having defining characteristics like helmets and straw hats, the role of a specific meeple is determined by its placement. A knight is a meeple placed within a city; a monk is one placed within a cloister; a thief is deployed on a road, while a farmer is played onto an open field.

Players score points by placing their meeples strategically. Meeples earn more points for players when they control more land. A knight meeple, for instance, earns two points for each tile of city it controls. The challenge for a player is to then build a city as large as possible, in order to earn the most points.

Each player only has seven meeples to deploy, so a great deal of the game's strategy entails the effective management of limited meeple resources (What a cool word: meeple!!!). The game ends once all 72 land tiles have been played.