Carcassonne is a tile-laying game for 2 to 5 players. You build the map together, one tile at a time, and place followers called meeples on it to score points. A game takes around 30 to 45 minutes, and the rules fit in a few minutes of explanation.
Setup
Put the starting tile face up in the middle of the table and shuffle the other tiles face down in stacks. Each player takes the meeples of one colour, and one of them goes on the scoring track at zero.
A turn, step by step
- Draw a tile and place it so that it touches the tiles already on the table. Every edge that touches another tile must match: road to road, city to city, field to field.
- Place a meeple (optional). You may put one meeple on the tile you just placed, as a knight in a city, a traveler on a road (called a thief in older editions), a monk in a monastery or a farmer in a field. It must go on a feature that no other meeple already occupies, counting the whole connected feature.
- Score completed features. Anything finished this turn scores right away, and the meeples on it return to their owners.
The game ends when the last tile is placed, after which the unfinished features are scored.
What each feature is worth
| Feature | When completed | If unfinished at the end | |---|---|---| | Road | 1 point per tile | 1 point per tile | | City | 2 points per tile, plus 2 per coat of arms (the shield symbol, often called a pennant) | 1 point per tile and per coat of arms | | Monastery | 9 points (the tile and the 8 around it) | 1 point for it and for each tile around it | | Field (farmer) | Only scored at the end: 3 points per completed city next to the field | |
Details new players get wrong
- Meeples are limited. With seven to place, you will run out. A meeple only returns when its feature is completed, so a long road with your traveler on it can lock him up for a long time.
- A feature belongs to the player with the most meeples on it. If two players tie, both score the full points.
- Farmers do not come back. A meeple placed in a field stays there for the rest of the game, which makes it a big decision.
- You can join features after the fact. A tile that connects two separate cities, each with a meeple of a different colour, creates one shared city. With one meeple each it is a tie, so both players score the full points when it is completed. If one player has more meeples in it, only that player scores.
Keeping score across games
The scoring track only reaches the end of one game. If your group plays Carcassonne often, track your games on Score It! and see who wins over time.