Strategy · 2000

Carcassonne

Lay tiles, claim roads and cities with meeples, and close a feature with more meeples than anyone else.

2–5 players
30–45 min
1.9 / 5 · Light

Set up the game

0 of 5 steps

Tick each step as you complete it.

1Separate the tiles: 72 land tiles, one of them the start tile with the darker back. The current edition also includes 12 river tiles and 5 abbots; for your first game, put those back in the box.
The three basic tiles
2Put the start tile in the middle of the table. Shuffle the rest and deal them face down into several stacks within everyone's reach: there is no hand, you draw from any stack on your turn.
Start tile and stacks
3Put the scoreboard next to the play area and place each scoring meeple on space 0. That meeple never returns to the table: it only moves around the scoreboard.
Scoreboard
4Give each player 7 meeples. The eighth meeple of each colour is the one on the scoreboard. Return unused colours —and their meeples— to the box: the game plays up to five.
Figures
Marker
5The youngest player starts, and play continues clockwise. Every turn is the same three steps in the same order: tile, meeple, score.
Tiles
Figures

What it is about

Carcassonne is the tile game you can explain in one sentence: place a tile, put a follower on it, score what closes. Underneath is a constant fight over majorities, because a feature belongs to whoever has the most meeples when it completes, not to whoever started it.

Play the first game without farms and without the river. That already shows the real tension: meeples are scarce, and each one you place is a bet several rounds ahead. Roads and monasteries return the meeple quickly; large cities hold it hostage in exchange for more points.

Farms change the ending. Three points for every completed city touching the field turn the last turns into a race to lay farmers in the fields around the big cities. It is the part almost everyone learns late.

BGG page Official rulebook

Source note

Based on the 2023 rulebook (84 land tiles, 12 of them river tiles) and the supplemental sheet for farms, because farms decide the final score. The River and the Abbot are covered in the FAQ, not as first-game rules.

EN rulebook (Z-Man Games, 2023) plus the supplemental rulesheet · Reviewed: 24 Oct 2026