This is the final instalment of our family game reviews for the Blogger Board Game club and this month we have written the Carcassonne game review which you can read below.
What is Carcasonne?
Carcasonne is a board game which was designed by a Klaus-Jurgen Wrede. Klaus was born in Meschede and studied music and theology in Cologne where he now works as a high school teacher. He received huge success after designing Carcassone and has since had many other games published.
Carcassonne has a simple strategy idea – create a landscape where players place knights, thieves, monks and farmers in order to score the most points. It is designed for children from the age of 7, although with a bit of help our 6 year old was able to join in sufficiently. It requires 2-5 players and each game takes roughly 35-45 minutes.
The game consists of
72 land tiles 40 meeples
1 score board 12 river tiles
5 abbots and the rules.
It does require some space to play and is best at a table or on a flat surface.
Our Carcasonne Game Review
The first thing we noticed was the design on the box, it uses drawn images instead of photographs of children playing which in my opinion makes it look less appealing, especially to children. I also think it makes it look like it is for even older children or adults and not from 7 years and I probably wouldn’t choose it if lined up with other more modern games. That being said it once again proves the whole don’t judge a book (or in this case a a game) by its cover saying
It took some time to get our head around the rules as there are three pages of them! However once you start playing it is simple enough and can get rather competitive rather quickly, especially when brothers are playing. In a bid to make it more simple the first time we played we just concentrated on creating roads and adding up our pints that way, then eventually we included the monasteries too.
Over all we all agreed it was a good game that requires thinking, concentration and strategic planning and is best suited to those that are happy to play slower games as apposed to quick fire, fast thinking games. When I asked the boys to compare Carcassonne to the last two games we reviewed; Cobra Paw and Dixit, I expected Cobra paw to be the winner so was surprised when Reece (9) said Carcassonne was his favourite and Connor (6) picked Dixit.
For more game reviews and recommendations check out our ten favourite family games.
You can order your own copy of Carcassonne from Amazon.
(We were sent a copy of the Carcasonne game in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own).