Carcassonne

This won Spiel des Jahres 2001

In this fairly light tile-laying offering, players pull a tile from the pool and then place it against one of the previously played tiles. If you create a new object (like a city, road or a monastery), then you can place one of your control markers on the tile to denote your control. Alternately, you can place your marker in the pasture on the tile as a farmer. Markers (called Followers by the publisher and called Meeples by us) cannot directly compete when placed, so to achieve some gains you must place your marker, then use later tiles to connect up to it.

As subsequent tiles are arrayed on the board, objects get bigger or even merge. Once certain objects are completed, like roads and cities, or the monastery is surrounded, then the control marker is returned to you and you score the points. However, farmers are not returned and will score points at the game end (there are several rules variations for the farmer scoring).

Therefore, it's possible to have all of your control markers locked on the board on incomplete objects, and not be able to convert them into farmers later in the game. You must balance the need to score points during the game, and the need to score farmer points at game end.

The goal is to have the most points at the end, which can be tricky to control considering your choice for each turn isn't the tile itself, but rather the placement of the tile that you drew. Think of a more strategic version of Metro's tile placement, with some of the scoring methods from El Caballero or even the Very Clever Pipe game.

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