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- Price: $4.99 (Download here)
- Version: 1.0
- Official Site: TheCodingMonkeys
Famed for its huge city walls, the medieval town of Carcassonne in southern France was identified as a strategic placement, perfect for defending from enemy attack and in just the right spot for merchants to travel through and sell their wares.
The Carcassonne board game was designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede and aimed to recreate the battling over the area that went on. It’s extremely good fun, and fortunately the iPhone edition is a fantastic conversion, taking nothing away from its tabletop brother in arms.
In Carcassonne, players take turns to place randomly chosen pieces, consisting of city, road, farm and cloister sections. Pieces can only be placed adjacent to others already on the board, and all edges must match up. For example, if there is a road protruding from the piece on the left, your current piece must also contain a road and must be placed so that the two paths connect.
Once a piece has been placed, the player can then choose to occupy a space on the piece with one of his or her soldiers — this is the method for scoring points. The position in which the man is placed determines what kind of unit it becomes.
Your men can be planted on towns, farms, roads and cloisters. Points are scored when towns and roads are completed, and when cloisters are surrounded by eight tiles. Farms are cashed in at the end of the game, with points awarded for every completed town bordering on your farmland.
Men cannot, however, be placed on a town, road or farm which is already occupied, and each player is limited to just seven soldiers. The game ends when every piece has been placed down.
This is a fairly simple explanation of how Carcassonne works, but there is a lot more to it in terms of tactics and piece placement. Areas can be potentially stolen from other players with clever piece layout and overpowering. For example, if a completed city houses two of the green team’s men and only one of the red team’s, green will take all of the points. The same tactics can be applied to roads and farms.
