Carcassonne
Justin Perez
Formal Elements
Carcassonne is played with 2-5 players. We played with three people. Each player gets seven "followers" to place on the map throughout the game. The game board is made up of square tiles. At the beginning of the game only one tile is in play, and every round each player takes a turn laying one tile to expand the board. After placing a tile the player can place one of his followers on the various sections of the board to make him a knight, farmer, thief or monk. Tiles has to be placed to their patterns will correctly match and line up. Points are awarded based on how big an area your followers are in (a knight in a large city or a thief on a long road get more points than those on smaller cities or roads). Once all the tiles have been played the game is over and the most points wins. Score is kept on another side board that has no real gameplay purpose.
Here is a picture of early in the game as the board is just beginning to grow. The board on the right is where score is kept.
Dramatic Elements
The idea of the game is to have your followers occupy the greatest area of the game board, or the areas that are worth the most points. Followers placed in cities are knights, placed on roads are thieves, in farms (big open fields) are farmers and on the church buildings are the monks. Strategic placing of your men can also be used to try and claim the same area as other players to take the points for yourself, but this was a very rare thing to come across.
Dynamic Elements
Points are only awarded upon the completion of things in the environment. For example, thieves only got points once their road was closed at both ends. If you placed a piece on the board you did not get it back until it could be scored (and thus could not use it to gain points elsewhere). Because of the order each turn went through (place a tile, place a follower, tally up any scores) our play experiment brought out a strategy to always try and use your tile to finish a road or town, then place your follower on that completed area, score his points, and then take him back, all within the same turn. This led to a lot of scoring happening quickly, but in small numbers. Another strategy that would arise would be to finish someone else's area with your tile instead of increasing one controlled by yourself just to stop the other players from building larger areas and gaining more points for them.
The yellow piece on the right gets 4 quick points (one for each tile the road goes through) for being a thief on the small completed road on the right side of the board.
Play Observations
It was quite often that you would need a specific pattern on a tile in order to complete a town or road which you control, but if you didn't get it (you pick from the remaining tiles, all face down) you were often stuck with nothing to do but place a more or less meaningless tile on the edge of the board which no one would end up using. So there is a fair share of luck that you need in order to get the right tiles to complete your roads or towns before the game is over. Pieces that are on the board in incomplete areas at the end of the game still score, but not as much as they would had their area been completed.
The yellow piece in the center of the board is left stranded there until a piece that will fit into that last hole is drawn by the player controlling yellow. Only half as many points were awarded for this knight's incomplete town.
Being in this situation often left a player with no more followers to place because they were all stranded on the board, waiting. In order to stop this we would try to each build off onto our own tangents of the board so that there weren't many other pieces around to make it difficult to match the pattern of the tiles to be placed.
Here you can see a road starting to branch off on its own at the bottom of the board.
This resulted in players often concentrating on their own little areas far away from the other players. This pattern highlights what we felt was one of the game's main weaknesses: There is not really much opportunity for player interaction or conflict. Pieces cannot be placed in areas already occupied by other followers, so the only way to have a sort of fight over the same piece of land was for two areas of the same type to become connected. This was another thing that happend pretty rarely because it required a tile to be found that exactly matched all the other tiles in the area. Because of this lack of direct competition we got bored pretty fast and instead resorted to gambling on side games of Connect Four (which can be seen in the edge of one of the earlier pictures).