Carcassonne

"An excellent European board game makes for great strategy and a great buy"

Carcassonne, originally a smash-hit in Europe, is a tile-laying board game wherein the object is to score the most points by successfully completing various structures. On your turn, you draw a tile and place it somewhere on the board, the catch being that the tile must "fit" (i.e. if a road is drawn through your tile, you must play it in a way that the road connects to other roads). To score points, you place settler pieces on areas of the board that you think you can eventually get to foster buildings. Once you successfully manipulate enough tiles to create your building, you score points and receive your settler back.

Confused? Its actually a lot easier than it sounds. This game is deceptively easy to pick up and loads of fun to play. Within a few games you will not only understand how the game works, but will begin to adopt a strategy. Most of the strategy lies in placing tiles such that your opponents' buildings will be near-impossible to build (due to the geography requirements). Strategy also comes in deciding when and where to place your settlers.

In addition to the basic game, the download comes with an optional river tile expansion, which essentially adds to the variety in your tile draws and creates a new obstacle to deal with. The board game Carcassonne presently has dozens of expansions, and it would be nice to see some of them uploaded and available online in the future, but the game as it currently stands is not just fun, its a welcome addition to the Xbox experience.

The game works great as a single player experience against the computer, but is even better online. You'll definitely get your 800 points worth on this game. Couple this with Catan for another 800, and you've got two great European board game successes on the Xbox Live Arcade.

One of the only downfalls to the game is the lack of exciting visuals and music, but that's just a product of the game being a board game. All in all, if you're looking for a strategic yet easy game to spend some Microsoft points, you can't go wrong with Carcassonne.

9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/30/07