Week 1: Research (Carcassonne)

Carcassonne by Klaus-Jurgen Wrede (yorgan raid)

What is Carcassonne?

First published in 2000, Carcassonne is a tile- based boardgame for two to five players that focuses on players building and expanding their own areas. The name Carcassonne came from a medieval fortess in Southern France of the same name, and the game features were all inspired by this as well. It is a point-based game in which the players earn points according where they placed their followers

The game contains 72 tiles with either a city, a road, a cloister, a grassland, or a combination of features, 1 score table, and 40 wood followers (meeples) in 5 different colors, in which each player will get 7 followers each.

How to play

1. The game start off with 1 tile faced-up. Then, each player takes turn drawing and placing the tile in a way the would make sense when connected to another tile prioer(city connects to city, grass connects to grass, road connects to another road, ...)
2. After placing a tile, the players can decide to place a follower on a feature of the tile. This feature must be free of any follower from another player being on the same feature that connects to it.
3. Once a feature is completed, the player can take back the follower on that feature, and earn the points according to which feature it was.
4. The game ends when all tiles is faced up.
5. All uncompleted features with followers on them at the end of the game will be scored according to the scoring system.
6. The player with the most points wins.

Strategy

With the various features comes many possibilites of strategy that players could use to play the game. Some player might try to conserve followers since there are only 7 of them. While some players might try to score as much as possible from the start, some players might be focused on blocking and preventing another player from getting points with the placement that could give that player a more difficult time to complete their feature. Another thing is that a player could try to build off another player's tile's feature that wasn't claimed yet, allowing more possibilities for them to earn points.

Expansions

The game has many expansions due to its popularity and its simple rules that allowed easy addition of new features. This includes Carcassone: Inns & Cathedrals,  Carcassone: River,  Carcassone: The Tower, and more. The newer editions of Carcassone also already included the features from Carcassone: River. 

Moreover, there are also many stand-alone spinoffs of the game with their own aesthetics and additional rules, and even digital variants of the game that allowed the game to be played on computers. Some examples of the spinoffs are the Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers, which revolves around building forests, rivers, and wildlife, the Carcassonne: Around the world series which created its own sub-variants including the version of the Gold Rush durin the 19th Century United States and the Amazon Forest. There's even Carcassonne: Star Wars, where planets replaced the original features.