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Carcassonne
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Catan gets some company in the 'Turn-Based Fun' genre on XBLA!

On Wednesday June 27, 2007, Xbox Live Arcade received yet another title to add to its growing list of more than 65 downloadable games. This time, it’s another German board game (like Catan) that was successfully made into a video game. And, like Catan, the board game version won the Spiel das Jahres (German Board Game of the Year) a few years ago. The board game version of Carcassonne was designed by Klaus-Jurgen Wrede, while the video game version is both developed and published by Sierra Online. As usual, there is a free demo to try out, as well as the full fledged version that will set you back a few Microsoft Points to download. In this case, the price tag is a well set 800 points.

Carcassonne equals turn-based fun!

Carcassonne is a turn-based strategy game that has simple game mechanics, but surprising strategic depth. It can be played with 2 to 5 players, and may remind you a bit of the game dominoes, but only in the sense that to place a tile, its sides must match the tiles it will touch. The game begins with a starting tile placed on the digital table, of which the players must build off of. That is, unless you’ve turned on the games optional free expansion pack, The River, which gives you 12 additional starting tiles that form a long winding river to build off of. Play resumes as each player, during their turn, gets a random tile from a deck of 71 and attempts to not only match them to existing tiles on the table, but to also use the various aspects of each tile to build cities, roads, and monasteries to accumulate the highest number of points by the time the tiles run out.

Each tile you place needs to match the tiles it will touch.

As I stated, the game can be played with 2 to 5 people. The game supports both single player and multiplayer modes. For single player mode, you have a few options. You can choose to play a “Basic” game with all the default rules, against 1-4 AI, set to any difficulty you choose. Or, if you want to tweak the default rules, choose the “Custom” game option. There is also “Free Mode”, where you can play by yourself with no scoring. If you choose to play one of the first two modes, there are 4 AI difficulty settings (Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert) to choose from.

Build cities, roads, and monasteries by strategically matching tiles as you play.

The multiplayer section of the game, allows a couple of venues for you to play in. As is customary in multiplayer XBLA games, you can choose from Ranked Match or Player Match. But what’s nice about Carcassonne, is that you don’t have a “hand” of cards or other things that your opponents aren’t supposed to see. Because of this, the developers have included support for local multiplayer! And for those of you with an Xbox Live Vision Camera, the game supports that as well. There are also various leaderboards, which are segregated into the usual categories: Single Player, Player Match, Ranked Match, and Weekly Ranked. They can be sorted by: friends, your rank, or the top scores. By now, gamers probably write this feature off, since it’s included in most games these days; but it does take time to implement so it’s worth mentioning that it’s there for us competitive types.