Carcassonne (XBLA) - Review

Board game remakes are a natural fit for the Xbox Live Arcade service; XBLA is all about the social experience, and simple multiplayer games allow players to talk to each other and have a relaxed game instead of worrying about having to shoot holes in things.  Plus, let’s face it, they’re probably dirt cheap to make, which I’m sure Microsoft and the gang see as a bonus.

Carcassonne is a great example of the whole online board game thing; based off a popular German game, this videogame version looks pretty much identical to what you’d play on the tabletop (barring the occasional animation) and apparently plays exactly the same as well.  The players (up to 4 offline, 5 online) are assigned random tiles, which can consist of roads, sections of town, grassland, etc.  The goal is to slowly build up the terrain, using the limited pieces at your disposal to take control of the cities, monasteries, and other parts of the land while similarly denying them to your opponents.

For a game which is determined almost entirely by chance through the randomised tile system, there is a remarkable amount of strategy involved in determining the outcome of a match.  As mentioned previously, you have a small amount of ‘people’ which you can place onto a tile to take control of it and any adjacent tiles which match; place one on a road, and the full length of the road is yours, as are cities or farmland.  Once placed, they are there until the road or city is completed; the strategy then comes from placing pieces intelligently so that they can be returned to your fold for future usage, as well as attempting to block your opponent’s attempts to retrieve their own pieces.

It’s fairly deep actually, but also quite relaxed; being turn-based and only getting to really do a single thing at a time, there’s plenty of incentive to have a chat to your opponents or enjoy the good old medieval style music which will have you rocking along in your seat…or not, more likely.

Carcassonne is a good little game to get if you like a more sedate, tactical experience when it comes to both your board games and online games; it’s doubtful that you’ll drop Call of Duty 4 to play more of it, but it can be enjoyable to just have a game and chill out every once in a while, even if the excitement level is somewhat lacking.          

     

Rating: 7.5/10

      

-Tim Sweeney