This is a game that’s certainly worth your 800 Microsoft Points.
Like Catan, you’ll need to lay down different kinds of tiles to reap spoils from the land, although here it’s more about construction than natural resources. Playing with two to five players (yourself included), the game will randomly distribute you one tile from a catalogue of around eighty. These tiles may have pathways, trees, dirt, or a combination of the three on them. Your goal is to develop these into roads and cities. You do this by completing a section of dirt or pathways – so, for example, if one pathway extends from a city and ends at a grouping of trees, that road actively links one place to another and will develop into a road. The dirt pieces have incomplete borders around them; if you can position several pieces in a way where the borders link to each other, that complete mass of dirt will erect a city.
The catch is that you must claim ownership of these pathways and soon-to-be-cities by placing ‘meeples’ – or followers – onto them to collect the points earned for developed land. You can only place meeples on tiles that you’ve laid down, and you can only do so on the same turn. So in essence, Carcassonne is about planning ahead and taking risks by claiming barely developed stretches of path of dirt and making something bigger out of them. Through a combination of skill (setting up the playing field so that your opponents must play to your cause) and luck (dealing with the random pieces you’re dealt), you’ll eventually be building cities that stretch across dozens of tiles, netting you massive points. There are also more specialized buildings like Mausoleums, which need to be completely surrounded by tiles to be built. You can also claim the farmland between cities, and you’ll score points at the end of the game for each city that touches it.
Like any strategy game that strikes the correct balance between the planned and the unforeseen, Carcassonne can become extremely addictive as you develop new strategies. There’s also some basic templates on which different types of players can play the game. You can bank a large chunk of your resources on developing a massive city, but there are only so many tiles given out during each game, so you may never finish. On the other hand, you can take on a bunch of short-term projects like small cities and tiny roads, which will net you a consistent diet of points but may not give you the huge payoff you’d like to see. It’s genuinely interesting to experiment with different strategies and develop yourself as a player.
If you want to change things up a bit, an expansion set called The River is also available. In it, you’ll need to construct a river that runs through the playing area before reverting back to the regular flow of play. It’s nothing too different from the regular modes of Carcassonne, but it’s enough to feel genuinely different.
Carcassonne can be played in single player with some fairly capable AI, through same-system multiplayer, or on Xbox Live via ranked or player matches. Each of these works well, and on Xbox Live, you’re on the clock when placing your tiles to make sure the game clips along nicely. Because of the simple visual look of the game and low-intensity gameplay, lag is generally non-existent. You’ll need to play all three game modes to unlock Carcassonne’s fun and well-balanced achievements, which run from short-term goals like having a farm which supplies four cities and long-term ones like collectively scoring 5000 points in all of your games combined.
Although it’s not a visually arresting or powerhouse Arcade release, Carcassonne ends up being a more than capable product with charm and long-term appeal.