Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a tile-laying board game for two to five players, created by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede. It first appeared in 2000, published in German by Hans im Glück and in English by Rio Grande Games (until 2012) and later Z-Man Games. In 2001, it won both the Spiel des Jahres and the Deutscher Spiele Preis awards. The game takes its name from the walled medieval city of Carcassonne in southern France.

**Gameplay**

Players build the game board as they play, constructing a medieval landscape. The game begins with one specific tile placed face up, while the remaining 71 tiles are shuffled face down for players to draw from. Each player’s turn follows three distinct steps.

First, a player draws a new tile and places it next to already-revealed tiles. The new tile must match the terrain features on its neighbors: roads connect to roads, fields to fields, and cities to cities. Connections only happen across adjacent edges, not corners. A cloister tile can be placed next to another cloister since it has no connecting features. If a drawn tile cannot be placed legally, players may either remove it from the game or return it to the draw pile.

After placing the tile, the player may choose to put a marker—called a follower or meeple—on a terrain feature of that tile to claim control. The follower cannot be placed if the feature already connects to one claimed by another player. Followers are placed upright on roads, cities, or cloisters, but are laid down on fields to show that fields score only at the end of the game. The follower’s role changes depending on the feature: thief or highwayman on a road, knight in a city, monk at a cloister or monastery, and farmer in a field. Features can become shared by opposing players when later tiles connect previously separate features—for instance, two separate fields with farmers can merge into one.

If a feature (except a field) is completed during a turn, the player who controls it scores points, and the meeple is removed and returned to the player’s stock. Each player has eight followers; one is used to track the score, so only seven can be on the board at once.

The game ends when the last tile is placed. At that point, all incomplete features—including fields—score points for the players with the most followers on them. The player with the highest total wins.

**Scoring**

During a turn, completed cities, cloisters, and roads are scored before the turn ends. A player can complete a feature by placing a tile, claim it by putting a follower on that tile, and then score it in the same turn—but the follower cannot be redeployed after being returned to stock, since the stationing phase already happened.

A city is complete when it has no unfinished edges. A road is complete when both ends are closed or it forms a loop. A cloister is complete when it is surrounded by eight tiles. Points go to the player(s) with the most followers in a feature; if there is a tie, all tied players get the full points. After scoring, all followers in that feature return to their owners. Generally, points equal the number of tiles in the feature; a completed cloister scores nine points (the cloister plus eight neighboring tiles).

At the end of the game, fields and other incomplete features are scored. A field’s score depends on how many completed cities it touches. If a field touches no completed cities—or only incomplete ones—it scores zero points.

**Older Editions**

Two earlier editions of Carcassonne exist, with different scoring for cities and fields. The current scoring rules appeared in the German version in 2004, but English releases still used first-edition rules until 2008. Third-edition rules are now standard in all releases, including Xbox 360 and travel versions, and are assumed by all expansions.

In the first and second editions, a completed city of just two tiles scored two points (one per tile) plus one extra point for each pennant in the city. The third edition removed this exception, treating all cities the same.

The biggest difference between editions is field scoring. In the first edition, fields were evaluated from the perspective of cities. The player(s) with the most farmers adjacent to a city received four points for that city. This meant followers from different fields could contribute to the same city’s score, and a single field could contribute to multiple cities. The second edition changed this approach.