This board game is my new favorite way to spend a Friday night – it’s fun yet challenging and feels fresh with every new play

Carcassonne is ideal for folks who aren’t into board games, or find the family room staples of Monopoly and Scrabble monotonous.

This territory-building, tile-based game with a French medieval theme has players competing to expand their landholdings. Carcassonne isn’t new: While it has sold more than 12 million copies since its first release 21 years ago, it remains relatively unknown.

Carcassonne is one of those quirky European games with the multicolor pieces and strangely-shaped game boards, like the popular Catan.

However, in my opinion this is far easier to get into than Catan and more immediately interesting when play begins. The instructions are admittedly a little daunting, more so than most board games I’ve played. However, the rules and systems reveal themselves to be incredibly simple as you play.

The game requires at least two players to play, up to five.

There is no elimination mechanic in Carcassonne, meaning that every player is in the game until the end when scoring is tallied. 

There are no elements of chance, either, with no dice or goofy spinners – only the five colored groups of “meeples”.

Meeples are tiny, person-shaped wooden figurines that represent each player’s citizens, who are in service of carving out territories in the historical-fictional founding of the ancient French city of Carcassonne — a real place that still exists.

Even more interesting, you’ll quickly notice there is no traditional game board.

This is because you build the game board as you go from a randomized set of tiles featuring illustrations of country roads, castle cities, and green fields, drawing one at the start of each player’s turn. (There is a scoring board that’s separated from the main game area to track players’ scores.)

However, the board tiles can only be placed against other tiles and in such a way that makes sense next to the tile you intend to place it down against.

For instance, you cannot place the imagery of a field on a tile directly against the interior of a city.

This is where the core strategy and the object of the game comes into play.

During a player’s next round, they can lay another tile or place one meeple on the tile that was last placed, provided that the tile has an image of a road or city; this is how a player builds control of a territory.

As turns pass, you can build out that road or city with tile placements that make sense.

Once complete, you’ll earn points for the amount of tiles used: roads are worth one point per tile, cities are worth two (cities with a crest icon are worth four), and fields are worth no points.

Here’s where things get challenging: All players have the option of placing their own drawn tiles next to tiles other players have already claimed.

This action contests the other player’s claim for either a city or a road. The winner of the tile points is the player with the most meeples on the city or road being scored.

This, of course, drives the strategy of the game, and I’ve seen many archetypes of players since playing Carcassonne for at least five years now.

There are aggressive players who try to challenge every territory feature in progress that they come across. There are passive players who just try to complete their little fiefdoms unnoticed — and there are players, like myself, who go for massive wins with multi-tile mega-structures.

The game ends when there are no more board tiles to be drawn.

The remaining road and city tiles still in progress are scored to determine the winner.

What I love about Carcassonne is how fresh every game session feels, thanks to the randomized board.

I also enjoy how many options are available in each turn just from two actions, drawing a tile and placing a meeple, and all of the strategic decisions that are possible with just those two options per turn.

Even better is that the core game box includes an expansion set of tiles that include a river feature that narrows the game’s strategy in on the river tiles.

This enhanced element mixes up the decisions players can make as they now have to consider this river. Then, when you get bored of that, you can purchase additional expansion sets that build upon the core game, such as The Princess and the Dragon, which sees players staving off a dragon attack and rescuing a princess.

There is indisputably an incredible amount of game here that should make a convert out of anyone who plays with an open mind. Carcassonne is available at the time of writing for just $26.99 on Amazon, but normally retails for $40.