Console Monster: Carcassonne Mini-Review

Console Monster writes: "Carcassonne is part of the growing trend of card and board games on Xbox LIVE Arcade, and whilst it may look slightly basic from the outside, once you delve deeper into the game you will find a thoroughly engaging gameplay experience.

The basis of Carcassonne is very simple. Players take it in turns to lay down map tiles in order to build certain features, such as roads, castles and monasteries, which all earn you points. However, you will not score any points for creating a feature unless you have placed one of your followers on it, although you only have seven followers to place at any one time. These followers cannot be removed from the board when they have been placed, and the only way for you to retrieve your follower is to finish building the feature that said follower is placed on. Furthermore, followers can also be placed as a farmer, which basically means that you gain a point for each tile of grass they are connected to. The downside to these farmers is that once placed, they remain in play until the final tile has been played, thus ending the game. The final thing to consider is that when the final tile has been played, any followers still placed on uncompleted features will earn you half the number of standard points to add to your total. As you can imagine, all these different features can lead to some very tactical gameplay..."

[gaminoz]

I was quite surprised how much fun there is to be had with this game. Just the sort of game that there should be more of on Xbox Arcade. I hope there are more add-on packs to come too.