Klawchat at 1 pm EDT today. Tentatively scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto at 6:05 pm.

I’ve been promising this writeup for months but there always seems to be a book or a trip in the way, which is a shame, since Carcassonne is definitely one of my favorite boardgames now and clearly top-ten material.

Carcassonne’s concept is very simple, generally a hallmark of good boardgames. All players build the board as you go, using a collection of square tiles that depict various pieces of roads, cities, and pastures. You keep no hand tiles, drawing one piece per turn and placing it immediately next to one or more pieces already on the table. You must make sure that the edges match – if a tile has a city on one edge, that edge can’t be placed next to a road or a pasture – which limits your options. Along the way, you place your followers, known as “meeples” to hardcore Carcassonne players, on cities, roads, or farms that you build to try to earn points, with bonus points awarded for completing cities, using city tiles with pennants, and for certain tiles available in the many expansions to the core game.

It’s an easy game to pick up but the changing board and the fact that your opponents are simultaneously building, often nearby, make gameplay different every time. You can play a solitary game, especially if you’re just playing one other person, but you can also play in a way that tries to steal points from your opponents by merging one of your cities with one of theirs, since the points for a completed (“closed”) city go to the player with the most meeples occupying tiles in that city.

The trickiest part of the game is the use of farms, which can be more valuable than cities if played properly. When you play a meeple on a city or road, you get the meeple back to redeploy once that city is closed or that road is completed. When you play a meeple on a farm, however, he’s there for the rest of the game. When the game ends, a player gets points for each closed city that his farm abuts, but a player often doesn’t have much control over how his farm grows, and a player can end up with nothing for one of his meeples if farms merge as the board develops and he’s outnumber on that farm when the game ends. As a result, when and where to place meeples is the main strategic decision for Carcassonne players, since you have no control over what tiles you draw but have complete control over meeple placement.

We’ve played with two to four players; four players can take a while, but two player games run under a half hour for us, especially since my wife and I tend to play apart from each other on the board. I’ve played online a few times, including two games against players who spent all of their time trying to glom on to my cities (by creating a new nearby city and attempting to merge the two), and not only was the strategy annoying, it didn’t seem to work – you can keep the game close that way, but you can’t get ahead without building some cities and farms of your own, so I never pursue this strategy myself.

We’ve used two Carcassonne expansions. The game currently comes with the first River expansion, twelve tiles that you use to start the game; it provides some structure and helps break up farms, but it doesn’t substantially change gameplay. The second, Traders and Builders, adds a number of new tiles, as well as two new pieces: the Builder, which allows a player to draw an extra tile when adding to the city/road the builder occupies; and the Pig, which increases the final value of the farm on which he’s placed. Both the Builder piece and the new tile configurations added quite a bit to the game, changing strategies but also providing more flexibility and, depending on how you use the Builder, allowing you to avoid wasted turns.

I’ll do one more game post in the next few weeks, updating the top ten and reposting the comments lost from the original thread last fall.

I’ll be on ESPN Radio in a few minutes here, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago around 9:25 pm CDT tonight.

Ticket to Ride is a series of board games from Days of Wonder, a U.S.-based game company that makes games that rival the top games coming out of Europe (mostly Germany). The original version of the game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 2004, spurring a series of expansions and spinoffs. Over the course of two months, I’ve played the original game with its main expansion, one spinoff, and a spinoff of the spinoff.

The original Ticket to Ride is the simplest, even with the 1910 Expansion. The game board shows the U.S. and Canada, with about 30 cities connected by train tracks of varying lengths. Each player receives 45 trains and begins with a handful of “destination tickets,” with two cities and a point value that represents the minimum number of trains required to connect them; if you complete a route between two cities on a ticket, no matter how convoluted the path, you receive the number of points shown on the card, but if you fail to complete it, you lose that many points. (You do have some flexibility around the tickets you keep.) The tracks come in different colors, and you have to collect train cards of each color to be able to lay trains on those tracks; the longer the track between two adjacent cities, the more points you receive for placing trains on it. Of course, the tracks between cities are limited, so you may end up blocked from your intended route. There’s also a bonus for the longest continuous route (regardless of tickets), and in the “Mega” game variant, a bonus for completing the most tickets. It’s a pretty simple concept and everyone we’ve introduced to the game has picked it up pretty quickly, but the game is completely different each time because of the mix of tickets you receive and the way the board develops. A complete game with two people takes 30-45 minutes; a complete game with four people takes an hour or so.

The first spinoff we got was Ticket to Ride Europe, which brings the same basic mechanics to a new map, that of Europe in the early 20th century, but with several twists to make game play more complex. The differences include routes through “tunnels” (where the exact number of train cards required isn’t known until after you start building, so you may have to use as many as three extra cards) and “ferries” (which require the use of locomotives, which are otherwise wild cards that represent every color), and train stations that allow you to use someone else’s route between two adjacent cities as part of your own larger route. I found it to be slower to develop, but it requires more route-planning strategy, and the flexibility of the stations means it’s easier to adjust on the fly.

We love both of those games and would recommend them, but the one I didn’t like was the Europe spinoff for Switzerland. This map is smaller, designed for two or three people using 40 trains each (you use the trains and train cards from the Europe set, so the Switzerland expansion just comes with the board and new tickets). It was obviously issued hastily, as the instructions are woefully incomplete. Many tickets are extremely short – some require just two trains – which means you end spending a lot of time pulling new tickets, and you will almost certainly end up blocked by an opponent at some point during the game. A smaller board for a quicker game sounded appealing to us, but this implementation didn’t work for me.