my favorite tabletop game on steam

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.

I am a big Carcassonne fan but I cannot recommend the digital version in its current state. Where to start...

If you intend to play online vs friends or strangers be prepared to get kicked out, a lot. This can by mildly annoying to game breaking. If you only intend to play solo, and are familiar with the boardgame, you'll face several issues which could easily have been avoided.

1. Why is there an auto field scoring button? You cannot auto field score in the board game and silently grabbing a field is part of the strategy. This is probably there to help new players, I understand that, but it should come with a toggle. At present you can toggle on/off the fields aspect of the game completely but not the auto score button.

2. Why on earth are you shown your current tile but not your upcoming tile? Not only would this greatly speed up the multiplayer experience, it would also give you something to think about while other players are taking their turns. This is such a glaring omission one wonders if anyone actually played the game before release. There are several free-to-play versions of Carcassonne available online that include this as standard.

3. Minor annoyances - Why does the view have to self centre at the start of every turn? You can be focusing on one particular part of the screen only to be snapped back to the centre view time and again. The controls could also have been improved. You can drop a tile with a left click but then have to mouse over the tick button to ok it. An option to use the right mouse button to ok would speed up play and avoid bothersome mouse management.

Overall, I'm very disappointed with the growing number of poor boardgame implementations, and will consider any future Lucky Hammers releases as buyer beware.

The gold standard remains Through the Ages and Twilight Struggle. I urge all developers to review those titles to see how it can and should be done.

ik hou van het bordspel dus dit is top

It's a nice game , and i only played with friends untill now. But it still has bugs. I have to exit the game and restart it when a friend invites me. It sometimes doesnt allow me to place meeples on tiles. And sometimes it doesn't show the scores at the end of the game. So untill they fix that, i dont recomment it

Despite the fact I love the tabletop version of this, and the fact I will likely keep playing, I can't justify rating this game positive.
The biggest issue is the lack of a proper AI design. If you take on a single AI opponent, it'll be tough, but winnable. Play against more than one however, and you've just handed the AI twice as many pieces with which to defeat you. This is because the AI only seems to recognize AI and Player as options. I have watched AI colors ignore placement options that would disrupt the other AI color in favor of disrupting me. I have watched the AI kill it's own ability to gain 45 points from one area in order to prevent me from completing something worth 10 points, or worse, to allow i the second AI color to gain 25. I've watched it complete the other color's cities to no value to it's own color, simply to make sure it wins. Or more precisely, to ensure the player loses.

This sort of bad coding methods to "increase difficulty" kill the very play balance of the game you're attempting to recreate and make me have very little faith in the developer's ability to accurately transfer any of it's other board game properties to Steam.

Sad, these are great games on tabletop.

Is it true to the board game? Yes
Is it a good computer game? meh...

The Good
+ True to the board game
+ Small Added visuals like growing cities and burning volcanoes
+ Remote Play Together
+ Can reconnect after you disconnect
+ Quality of life displays like showing the control of fields and the places there are no pieces left for.

The Bad
- Optimized for a tablet not a PC
- Asks you about resolution and other settings at start up and ignores it
- Does not utilize Steam's friend system or invite system.
- Requires a special login to play anything online, must create a new fiends list using external websites instead of anything built in.
- Slow to process moves.
- Connection issues.

TLDR: This TABLET game is OK

This is a reasonable implementation of a fun game, but i can't recommend it because there's a relatively high chance that something about your computer/setup will land you being continually booted from multiplayer games. You can see by looking at the forums that this problem has been around since at least April 2020, and the developers have been contacted on numerous occasions, but the problem still remains as of this writing (November 2020).

Among our friend group, only one of us out of five or so has had this problem, but it happens to her every game, and it makes it ridiculous to try to play, as she has to continually log back in, sometimes multiple times during one turn. Add to this the fact that it will sometimes disconnect her without telling her, and it basically makes the game unplayable.

If this ever gets fixed, I'd change this to 'recommend', but not until then.