by: Dakota Grabowski

August 30, 2007

There are very few board games on Xbox Live so when Microsoft announced last year that Sierra would be bringing Carcassonne to the Xbox Live Arcade service, my excitement rose. My prayers for a diverse set of games on the XBLA were finally answered since I was getting tired of old ports from retro classics.

What exactly is Carcassonne? Of course, like I mentioned, it’s a board game. The gameplay pits players around a French fortress where they must match wits to gain as much land as they can to win. Players will draw from a deck of 72 tiles that are represented by different structures such as castles and roads. After drawing their tiles, the players will have to place them in effort to claim their part of the city. After all 72 tiles are divvied out, the player with the most structures on the map wins.

To be able to claim a structure as your own, the player must place their “meeples” on the map. “Meeples” is Carcassonne jargin for “my people” and once they are placed on a structure, it’s yours to gain points from. Completing the structure will provide full benefits from the structure with more points – but with only so many meeples to use, players will have to strategically place them on the map and pick and choose which structure to work on.

There’s so much here in terms of depth and strategies that I am afraid that if I tell you more, I’ll be revealing all my secrets on how to win the game. The more you play Carcassonne, the better understanding you’ll receive on how easy it is to play. What I will let everyone know is that the graphics are actually decent for a board game. The graphics, which are full of vibrant colors, are adequate enough for what I expected.

Unfortunately for all those players that love to play single-player games, you’ll have to look elsewhere. The only issue I found with the online portion of the game is that there is a slight delay when other players are finishing their turns. Putting that issue aside, Carcassonne is a solid game that is one of the better Xbox Live Arcade game titles to date.

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This is one step behind Catan for me personally but it's still one of the top five games on the XBLA. You can do no wrong purchasing Carcassonne and having a good time with the game.

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