Carcassonne

While looking for something simple to play casually on my downtime, I came across Carcassonne, the Xbox LIVE Arcade adaptation of the board game. It is a casual turn-based top-down strategy game. Each player takes a turn to lay a tile. Each tile has a combination of Keep, Road or Farm on each side. The goal is to match the sides to one another in the form of a medieval map-puzzle collecting points for each completed form of infrastructure by marking it with a Meeple.

Review of Carcassonne from a famousblueraincoat
Played 10+ hours on Xbox360
Available for Xbox360 (XBLA) ESRB: E
"Let my Meeples Go!"

I know what you're thinking... By now you've more than likely navigated away from this review and gone to the forum to complain about how there's still no BF43 review. In all honesty though, I thought it important to review Carcassonne because it's truly a shining example of how simple and casual games ought to be made. Besides, it's something to use your leftover Spacebucks (Sony or Microsoft Points) from purchasing your BF1943. So there.

Admittedly, I should have been playing more of BF1943, and I should have been writing my review for it as well, but logistical aspects of time and television quality (currently I'm playing on a 1989 Zenith) have, for the time, gotten in the way of these reviews. This, I think, highlights entirely what a great game Carcassonne is. It's entirely casual, quickly accessible, without all the setup and tear down of the actual boardgame.

If you've never played Carcassonne table-top before, the XBLA version offers quite a few options of tutorial. It teaches the basic rules and systems of scoring points as well as some very basic tactics to make the game more interesting. Everything in Carcassonne is customizable, just like in the tabletop. Not only can you turn points for 'farms' off (I play that way on tabletop, because I'm usually too intoxicated to count up how many complete keeps my meeples are touching!) you can also turn every other form of score on or off depending on your interest. It also allows for you the option for 'International' or 'US' scoring for 2-tile keeps. Up until now, I hadn't even realized that there was such a rule, and it totally changes the gameplay.

In addition to the standard combinations of tiles, the XBLA version comes with an optional 'river' expansion. In River, players take turns placing all of the river-tiles. After exhausting them all, the regular tiles are then played. This gives a much more interesting structure to the field of play, forcing players to build on or around certain established infrastructure.

Although you can play up to 5 players over XBoxLIVE or PSN, what this game is lacking is a "pass the controller" mode of multiplayer play. As it stands, you'd have to have 5 controllers to play on the couch with 5 friends which seems ridiculous. The computer players, on the bright side, offer a good level of challenge if you don't have any friends.

Overall, I think this is a major problem with the industry, as it cuts an audience's accessibility to higher technological 'quality' experiences with games, and in the meantime misses the establishment of quality tactical experience. [For more, see my Project Reality review] I didn't intend for this to be a commentary on hardware accessibility, I think this is just the perfect example of hardware changes, as it has for years has been a board game on 'hardcore' par with Settler's of Catan and Axis & Allies.

In the end, Carcassonne is almost too perfect as it takes the complicated 'math' aspect of the board game entirely out of the picture. I've run stringent inebriation tests, playing both this version and the tabletop absolutely wrecked and I can tell you that a game does not allow you to make 'mistakes' in laying tiles down is the perfect casual game. No longer will you lay a monastery in the middle of a keep, or build a road intersection without it intersecting.