[ROOT`iaguz]

Preface: I normally make these as blogs but I currently have one in the latest blog section and I'm not one to hoard real estate in this particular context. There is real estate I do hoard but, well just read the post!

I'm ******* bored right now. I type this from my mother's work laptop which uses a portable 4G internet attachment to be connected. Mum's work involves selling large quantities of Graphical Tablets so this laptop is devoid of anything else interesting. Brother Benjamin has brought his laptop which has starcraft but no means of acquiring precious internet. It is a bit of a bind. I really should be practicing right now, but here I am confined to a house with a bunch of relatives.

At least it's a good time to crack out some boardgames!

Now I've written about a few of these but I don't actually own a great many boardgames myself, me and Josh have taken advantage of those owned by friends of ours or have visited a boardgame cafe. But that changed when josh's wife decided to buy him one for christmas. When she went to the shop she asked "whats something light easy and fun that even a relatively normal person like myself can easily learn how to play without fear of becoming one of those huge smelly nerd types" . The shopkeeper handed her a copy of Carcassone.

Which was an excellent choice. Carcassone is a game for 2-5 players about placing tiles on a board and occasionally placing dudes to score points. Each turn you pick up a face down tile reveal it to everyone and place it in the most strategic and legal location you can find. Each tile features some amount of roads, grassland, city segments or churches and you place them connected to each other in a legal fashion, roads move into roads, walls surround cities and grass moves into more grass. You place dudes to benefit from longer roads, surrounded churches and finished cities and you do this to score precious points.

You continue to take turns until you run out of tiles to place and then you add up points and declare a winner. Simple. We could get Natalie and Benjamin into this game easily and they aren't your regular boardgaming folk. So there's accessibility covered.

Carcassone's strategy is reasonably complex but it's the sort of game that you can play it without considering too much about longer term play and still feel like you are making correct plays. It's not tremendously difficult to pick up your tile, read the board and then discover the immediate best place to put it and it has that small sense of progression almost every time you place a tile. Sure it might not be 100% optimal but at least it advanced something so you get that feeling of making correct plays. If you're not too interested in thinking too much you've got a game that goes at a great pace that has been typically finishing in about 40 minutes.

But if you do care about deep strategy then Carcassone delivers. There's a lot of ways to place tiles in such a way to severely hamper opponents strategies, plus that delicious feeling of drawing exactly the tile an opponent needs or that other feeling of leeching off their hard work with a modicum of effort yourself. It's a game about short, mid and longer term plays and how to benefit most from the inherent randomness that the tiles can generate. It's a skillful mixture of rule simplicity and gameplay complexity and can be enjoyed at whatever level you prefer. A fantastic piece of design.

So do I like Carcassone, is it fun? I think it's fun but it's a very quiet consistent sort of fun. Some games are like Betrayal in the house on the hill or Battlestar Galactica, players play with this constant tension that bubbles over into excitement or perhaps aggression and players are constantly treating each other with suspicion and distrust but there's none of that with Carcassone. Carcassone is not a roller coaster of a boardgame, it's not a game that ever wows or surprises you, it's not a game about crotchpunching your opponents or startling developments. It's a game about quiet contemplation and strategy best savoured maybe with some tea or thinking vodka and when the game is over there's a quiet satisfaction to it all.

This game is the bread and butter of boardgamery, it lacks zest or spice but it's reliable and you know what you're gonna get every time. And maybe you already 'get' boardgames and maybe this isn't very exciting or fun for you but that's fine! It's an introductory piece and what it does it does extremely well. It's light, easy, moves at a good pace and doesn't require a huge amount of rules or time or effort and won't start fights. At least it shouldn't. Seriously if you fight someone over Carcassone I think you need help. And that's all a game really has to do sometimes so if it looks good to you, go get a copy. I give it a solid recommendation.

[Benji]

Haven't played Carcossone yet, but me and my friends have been playing Settlers of Catan, Pandemic and Ticket to Ride for a while, and I've recently picked up the BSG board game as well (had a few games with that too). Will have to look at Carossone when we need to try something new.

[ROOT`iaguz]

Ahh I hated Ticket to Ride! It felt too one player, with any move to block an opponent being pointless so it comes down to who drew the best objective cards at the start of the game. Blocking a player sucks because it's very expensive, you don't get anything out of it, they have those stupid stations to get out of trouble and it only hits one person when you probably need it to do more then that.

I honestly have not played Pandemic or Settles despite them both being classics. I have a copy of Starfarers of Catan the sci fi spin off but I can barely remember what happened when I played it. Maybe it was crap? Not sure