Carcassonne strategy

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What a great board game! I tried Carcassonne for the first time this weekend. It took me a game or two to fully understand the rules and start building some strategies. We played Carcassonne: Inns and Cathedrals. For those who never played this game, the goal is to get control of cities, roads, cloisters and farms. To do that, you need to put your pawns in strategic locations to make sure you will have control on the game elements. The added game element in the Carcassonne expansion "Inns and Cathedrals" are the Inns near a lake that makes a road counts double points. The Cathedrals also gives more points when you finish building a city containing one. The major difference in the expansion is that you need to finish the road or the city containing the new elements to score the points.

What I would like to do in this first post about Carcassonne board game strategy, is to show you how I played the game the first time. In other post, I will try to improve my game strategy and tell you what was worth trying and what was not. So here's a description of my first game of Carcassonne.

Carcassonne strategy in game #1

In this first game I was always impatient to score some points and put some meeple in play. Almost every time I was drawing a new Carcassonne tile I wanted to add something on it. So my first few tile (yellow Carcassonne meeples) looked like this.


So at this point in the game, I already feel like I'm losing some ground, but hey, it's my first game and I want to score big on that road. My brother (red meeples) already have a Carcassonne farmer and one city under control (for now). While the game was progressing, my brother was still putting some farmer here and there making sure to control the entire map. The way the roads were shaping up in the city of Carcassonne, there where no place to put more farmer, so I decided to focus on making large city. I've learned the hard way that trying to build big in this board game could lead to a bad scenario. Here's what I'm talking about.



In the picture above, you can see my meeples trying to control this "big" city. The tile numbered 1, 2 and 3 are mine and the tile number 4 was the last tile placed by my brother. This last Carcassonne tile was forcing me to add at least three other city tile (if lucky) to close this city. I think only ten tiles were left on the pile when he made that move. First mistake, trying to build a big Carcassonne city is not a smart move when there's few tile left, especially that killer tile filled with city dirt. Second mistake, put too many meeple for nothing, my brother was not going to fight for this city.


Strategy results

If I make a very quick overview of my first game, I would say that I should have pay more attention to the farmer. My lack of experience cost me a lot of point by not controlling any city with my Carcassonne farmers. I was playing heads up with my brother, so I'm guessing that farmers are very important when there's only one opponent. Time will tell me if I was right. Another thing I noticed about my play, was my rush to put meeples on the map. When I saw my brother taking over all the grounds with farmer, I was short on Carcassonne pawns to try fighting for some ground. And like I wrote above, trying to build too big is a risky business.

This is the tile that starts it all and I can't wait to play some more great games with the board of Carcassonne. In fact, I already played more than one game this last week-end and in my next post, I will explain how my second game went, so don't miss Carcassonne strategy game 2. This time, we were six player trying to fight the roads, inns, cathedral, cloister and farms ob rge land of Carcassonne!

My other post on Carcassonne

More Carcassonne strategies
Other strategy for other type of Carcassonne board games. In this post, I revealed my experience with this game when playing with more than two opponent.

Carcassonne round-up
Post containing a summary of all my Carcassonne strategy.