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Review Detail

Carcassonne Board Game
Board Games 1525
An Assassin in Clown Paint
Rating 
 
4.0
tl;dr — Potentially light and mild, it's a great social game when played in 30ish minutes, but sags if it goes longer. Expansions are the seasoning and so should be used sparingly to create the game that suits your current mood. Terribly cruel when played to win, though.

Neat for what it is, a kids' game that can be played for blood (farm wars, anyone?). The vanilla version is a pleasant-enough pastime. Where Carc really shines, though, is as a game system—the mix 'n match expansions allow you to complicate or flavor the game as you will.

UPDATE: Revising down to 3 stars. This was shockingly novel at first, being only the second Eurogame I'd ever seen, but now... And another thing: The 8,000,000,000 different farm-scoring schema make for bizarre parallel-dimension gaming where some people at the table have evil goatees and some don't, leading to the disastrous overlay of competing realities, some where farmers lie on their backs and gaze at duck-shaped clouds scudding by and others where you can only get promoted by stabbing your boss in the neck.*

*So, 12 years later, it looks like this has settled down—the standard seems to be German 3rd Edition rules with "farm-centric" scoring of cities for three points each. I like the simplification—as well as the change making the tiny two-bit mini-cities worth four points instead of two, eliminating a rules exception, always a good thing.

UP-UPDATE: This is the game that made me realize that most expansions are crap—they just add plaque that calcifies a decent game into an immobile, spiky mess. (Or, to go to the other extreme, bloats it out so it can't even wear pants anymore.) Expansions, in general, are a terrible idea unless:

a) It was a part of the original game (as designed) that got peeled off to make the base game simpler/cheaper,

b) Actually adds an element that enhances repeat plays, or

c) Fixes one or more broken elements that really shoulda been caught during playtesting.

Only three expansions for Carc fit any of that—The River, Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders. Everything else is dessicated mummy-crap.

UP-UP-UPDATE: Resurrecting this as a mild social activity; as a "game" game it gets 2.5 stars, when consumed as a small bowl of whipped cream it's 3 stars. The deal with the expansions is to understand that every tile added into the mix is another turn—and if you've got multiple axes to consider (with several expansions at once) then those turns can become very long indeed. The game works best when it comes in well under an hour; it wants to be short.** I can honestly only see using one expansion at a time...

**The closer to 30 minutes the better.

I forgot what an awful little game this can be: so much grief, so many ambitious building projects that will never be completed, so many farmers stabbing each other in the tummy with pitchforks from the backs of rage-donkeys.

I'm not sure how the rest of world plays this, but man, we are just plain mean to each other.

Me likey.

UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: Back up to 3.5 stars where I expect it to stay. When grokked and played accordingly—as a shortish social activity with one big and maaaybe one small expansion at a time it's a pip.

CODA: GROINS IMPLY BOOTS

The sheer ruthlessness required to play the game competitively is entirely at odds with the presentation: cutesy li'l squares of bucolic cartoons, and the meeples themselves, adorable and nonthreatening, the very symbols of "points without pain" Eurogaming. If the package reflected the truth of it the art would be dark and violent: fields strewn with fresh grave-mounds, dangerous roads to nowhere festering with spleen-stabbing thieves, sprawling slums with gaping holes in the walls patrolled by gangs of baby-stomping kingsmen.

This is what you must do to win: sucker your opponents into fights that you either dominate or walk away from (leaving them overextended), place tiles to ensure their followers are trapped in projects that will never be completed, and never share points unless you are so far ahead it doesn't matter... and even then, hook yourself in for +1 at the last minute to steal the "joint effort" for yourself.

You must crush dreams, snap their bones and suck the marrow. You must be prepared to engineer fallen crests and hopelessness. I'll be honest: I felt like a complete jerk at first, as playing to win in Carc is really about making everyone else lose, and the constant pooping in the punchbowl can suck the fun right out of the party. But if you wish to do your best then that tile must be placed where it maximizes both personal gain and does the most harm to your opponents.

In the end the countryside puzzle we are constructing is a façade that does nothing to conceal the suffering of the nameless, numberless peasants who are too small to see from our lofty perches of intrigue.

Carcassonne is an assassin in clown paint.

Rating bumped up to 4 stars.
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