Recipient of the 2001 Spiel Des Jahres award, Carcassonne is a tile-laying game for 2-5 players.
Each turn you draw a tile, and place it onto the growing landscape. Tiles have some combination of road, city, farmland, or a cloister, and need to be played onto adjacent tiles so that each edge is touching the same feature (eg, roads connect to roads).
You have a limited number of playing pieces too. They can be robbers (on roads), knights (in a city), farmers (on the grass), or monks (in a cloister), and you use these to score points when feature you build is completed.
This is a quick-playing and easy to learn game. In each turn, you only get to play one tile, and then decide if it's worth putting one of your playing pieces on it.
Sounds simply, but you will have to weigh up your decisions to try and come out victorious. Things like:
Will I try and extend my road, or am I going to be sneaky by making it more difficult for my opponent to finish building that castle?
- or -
Is it worth using my last playing piece in this cloister, or should I try and get some quick points on the road?
Your answers to questions like these (and more) will open up new possibilities for gameplay, and alter the course of the countryside itself!
This game is family-friendly, and works well with just two players.