Carcassonne

Carcassonne

There's a certain subset of hardcore gamers, people who aren't quite to the point of detailed, Battle for North Africa-level wargaming but who refuse to play the standard fare available in the toy aisle of most stores. For this market, a small group of European companies full of creative folk basically invented and defined a genre almost a decade ago with the release of Carcassonne, which started the trend of "German Board Game" as a label for a style of play- highly conceptual math, bartering and trading, and a finite, usually tile-based system instead of moving tokens around a circuit.

Carcassonne is the granddaddy of this genre, and makes the transition to video game form flawlessly. The basic idea is to build castles with tiles that have either grass or castle edges, with the occasional road piece thrown in to mix it up. Your limiting resource is that you only have 7 "Meeples" to claim things with, and you get them back only when your road/castle/church is completed, forcing you to decide whether to finish the castle early to get your meeple back or try to expand it.

The music is typical, just generic middle-aged fife and bells, maybe a minute and a half long, and the sound effects are similarly cheap, but no one plays it for the graphics or sound design. With five-player multiplayer (including local multiplayer, though sadly no hotseat play.) the fun comes in politicking your cause, and enticing everyone else to try and screw their neighbors before they realize you've been playing them all along.

If it's even possible, the video game version is actually better than the original, since it eliminates all the bookkeeping and loose pieces that can make the game a bit of a chore to score at the end, though the as-you-go scoring makes it a little tough to build a commanding lead. The DLC for the game adds an eight-tile beginning set that puts a massive river through the middle of the board, but realistically it adds little to an almost-perfect experience. The learning curve on this game is steep, but highly rewarding, and since it was offered free last year for a week, online is suitably populated, making finding a game even today easy.

Graphics: Servicable. Zoomed in all the way, there's a lot of nice touches, but nothing groundbreaking. 2/5
Sound: You'll be plugging your iPod in for this one. 2/5
Controls: Simple, but the game makes few demands. High score for not trying to be too cute. 4/5.
Tilt: As a multiplayer experience, it eclipses everything that made the original the Origins Award winner for Board Game of the Year. 5/5.
Overall (not an average): 5/5.