Game is playable, almost enjoyable. A few things need to be fixed.
1. This is a game about seeing the board. Giant interface buttons need to be scalable or scaled down and moved to the edges of the screen.
2. Show farms button should remain on when clicked, everytime you change games it turns off.
3. Please remove the horn blast everytime I change to a new game, if you want to do it once at the start of a game fine.
4. Infrequent crashes to the desk top, when selecting the Remaining Pieces option.
5. Can't be bought as a gift...really?
6. Stop the new admin chat every time i switch to a game, all it does is flag the chat notification flag so i never know if I have a new message.
7. Stop asking for the config every time I open the game or at least make it work. Changes do nothing.
8. Eliminate "Are you sure you want to exit" prompt when exiting the program. Why?
A. There is no penalty for exiting the program except having to restart it.
B. It a complete waste of my time.
C. It's 2019
9. Eliminate the "Quit?" "You are opting out of the match.." prompt. When selecting "Return to Menu"
A. You aren't opting out of the match.
B. Again there is no penaltry for returning to the menu, except for re-entering the game.
C. It's another useless waste of time.

Fix this stuff and the game will be much more enjoyable.

Let’s make one thing clear right from the start: I LOVE Carcassonne. I’ve played hundreds of tabletop rounds with my friends, and hundreds more on the Xbox Live Arcade version that came out like ten years ago. It’s a fantastic intersection of strategy and building, with impressive depth to even just the base game’s mechanics. I assumed that a new digital edition of Carcassonne would be just as good as the one I remembered, but to my surprise I was quite wrong on that count. While this one will get the job done if you need your city-spanning fix, there are quite a few weaknesses to be aware of before buying in.

Carcassonne is a classic board game set in the pastoral south of France. You and the other players take turns picking tiles at random, which may contain parts of roads, cities, or other picturesque features. You must place your tile in a way that fits with the existing tiles on the board, and then you can use one of your little humanoid tokens (called Meeples, no, really) to claim one of those mentioned features. Completing a city or road with your Meeple on it earns you points, and so the goal of the game is to build bigger and smarter than your opponents to claim the most points.

There’s more to it than this, of course. There are monasteries and bonus city tiles, and you could probably write a dissertation on the mechanics of fields and how they can decide entire games. This edition of Carcassonne also comes loaded with the Abbot expansion, which adds a special Meeple for monasteries and gardens, and offers the River and Inns & Cathedrals expansions for even more complexity. Whether you go in for the broader experience or not, you can spend dozens of hours mastering the strategies and agonizing over perfect tile placements here.

All of that can be experienced in the tabletop game, of course. Here on Steam, you get some additional features which are expected but still manage to be pretty anemic. Obviously the game is suited for multiplayer, and the matchmaking system is swift and simple though it’s presently working with a player base of less than a hundred. There are also bots to beat up on for a solo experience, but don’t expect much of a challenge here. Three difficulties of AI are offered but only the hardest one seems to make use of the game-changing fields, and doesn’t even do it very effectively. It’s fine for practicing or just getting a quick fix, but I wouldn’t really bother with this version unless you plan on doing plenty of online building.

You’ll also need to overlook the obvious mobile port vestiges like giant oversized buttons and a general lack of polish. The graphics aren’t terribly impressive, and at least animate pleasantly with little flags and houses when you finish a city. Meeple placement can be a little touchy based on the tile hotspots, and sometimes placing one causes the camera to wig out. There are some handy features like a field ownership overlay and a visual list of remaining tiles, and both of these options (and others) can be toggled on and off for the grognards in the audience. Overall the presentation feels a bit low-rent, but still contains the features you would expect at a bare minimum.

If it sounds like I’m trying to steer you away from this edition, you’re not strictly wrong. As much as I love Carcassonne this feels like a rather shoddy attempt at bringing it online. It definitely suffers from being preceded by the excellent Xbox version, so if you’ve never played that one you may be a bit more generous. But the fact remains that the bots offer little challenge or resistance and the player base isn’t where it should be for a healthy variety of matches. Normally that would be a good cause to rally people in support but honestly you might just want to grab the physical version and sit down with your friends. This one’ll get the job done if you want to challenge randos on the internet, but only just.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

Review recommendation really should be "yes, with caveats".

Base Game? Absolutely. I'd absolutely recommend this game. Base Game plus an expansion or two? Sure.

Base Game with all expansions turned on, vs. 3 AI computers? Hope you have a sandwich to eat.

The game is great until about the last 30-40 tiles. Once you get down to the last 30 to 40? The computer AI will take a solid minute to decide where it wants to play. The last few tiles are excruciatingly worse, too, taking minutes to resolve. Direct point of comparison, I've written my review (and looked up how to spell "excruciatingly") in the time it's taken for one computer AI to decide to complete a 2 tile city on the edge of the board.

My suggestion is, if you want to play this game with AI's, turn off expansions if you have them all (say, from Humble Bundle), play with fewer AI, or don't play with fields. Fields make the problem easily 10x worse.

If there is anything you could wake me up for, it's a good board game!
But I must admit, I never heard about Carcassonne before until my friend Batprince gifted this to me.
As soon as I figured out the basic rules I found myself getting addicted fast.

The amount of options in the game seem overwhelming at the start, but you'll figure everything out soon enough.
The game starts of with a starting tile, after that you'll receive a random tile each turn and you can choose where to place it.
A tile can feature things like a portion of a road, a field, or a city, and the tiles edges must match up with the tiles it’s placed next to on the board.
You also have pawns that are called meeples, which you can place on different places such as the road, field, city and so on.
You now own that road, field, city or what so ever, and the bigger or longer it becomes the more points you will get once it's completed.
Opponents can also steal ownership by creating new building sections and roads with more meeples on them and connecting them to yours.
It can get so frustrating when your opponents blocks you off, steals your city or when you don't find the tile you need.

The game doesn't only come with a single player option, but also has the option to play online against friends or random people on the internet.
You can create a match with a maximum of 6 people.
I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of people playing this game and I was finding a match within seconds.
To spice it up you can buy expansion packs too, which give you more tiles to add and the possibility to gain more points.

Unlike many people in the review section that seem to experience crashes, the game runs surprisingly smooth for me, I haven't experienced any bugs and I crashed only once.
I really enjoy it and I have nothing negative to say.

If I remember correctly, it was 14 years ago that someone introduced me to the board game Carcassonne. I loved it straight away and quickly bought my own set and a couple of expansions. Obviously, this game is meant to be played together with friends. But occasionally, I feel like playing this game when no one is around so a digital version is quite handy in that case.

I don't think I would have paid €10 for this but luckily I was able to pick it up real cheap as part of a bundle. I added a couple of expansions when they were on sale since I prefer playing the game with at least one or two expansions to increase the number of tiles. The upside of a digital version is that the computer keeps track of the score so you don't have to worry about that. This digital version also includes some handy features that you can either switch on or off. The Dead Tiles option shows a big red cross on the playing board where you can't place any tiles anymore (because no matching tiles are left in the remaining stash). You can play with a Remaining Tiles List which conveniently lists all the different tiles and how many of them still remain. And finally, you can also choose to play with or without Fields. If you play with fields you can get an overview of which field belongs to who with just the press of a button.

Since this game is meant to be played with other people, you can play online - either with friends or random other players. I've read a lot of complaints about the online version but I haven't had any issues with it so far. Alternatively, you can play offline against bots and I actually prefer this since you don't have to wait that long until it's your turn again.

Digital versions of board games either work or they don't, and this version just works. As a bonus, the developer has added achievements to the game. Unfortunately, these achievements are in-game only and not linked to Steam. That's a missed opportunity if you ask me because it's always fun to compare achievements with your friends.

If you love the original board game and you see this digital version on sale, I would definitely recommend you pick it up (and maybe convince a friend to do the same if you want to play online).

This is a pretty decent version of Carcassonne, but the default settings are pretty messy.

For a decent gameplay experience, make sure that graphics are set to low, that full length animations are off, and that the game is set to the top-down view instead of isometric. When all that's done, it works well and looks clean. That said, it could do with some anti-aliasing or just 2D elements a la the iOS/Android versions.

I would also like to use WASD to move the camera, as is implied by the launcher options.

If you enjoy Carcassonne, then you'll love the Steam version.

The AI takes a bit longer than I would think necessary, but the animations and graphics make up for it.

If you're thinking about getting it, grab the bundle, and make sure you register with Asmodee to get the Abbott expansion for free.

The most frustrating thing about this is that it seems to be the mobile game ported to PC but they haven't scaled any of the UI, so it's all GIGANTIC when it doesn't need to be and there's no way of scaling it down. It also gets in the way of the board.

Other frustrations like not being able to freely move the camera around the board, the timer running out immediately just booting you out of a game, not having an individual turn timer (forcing you to wait for 15-25 minutes sometimes if an opponent is AFK) or the fact that most online games have high karma restrictions which seem to stop newer players building up their karma levels, stop this from being a perfect version of Carcassonne.

That all being said I'm still having loads of fun with it, the graphic style of the board itself is really nice, and I've played for 12 hours in about 3 days.

For Multiplayer - 10/10 Perfect score
For Single player - 5/10 The AI sucks, it doesn't play farms, it's not even worried that your farms are going to destroy their score near the end of the game. Work with farms, and you can defeat the AI way too easy.

Either way, I bought this to play multiplayer, so ignoring the Single player Silly AI like it never existed, and this game is perfect version of Carcassonne !!! Brilliant!

Been playing this for 12 hours straight with my boyfriend, it's an amazing game. We played with 3 expansions (river, abbot and inns & cathedrals) and it was so much fun! I recommend this game :) Each round is different and it's very easy to learn.