by leungd
My girlfriend and I started to really get into gaming when we first got Carcassonne several years ago. It was our gateway game. Since then, we've gotten a few of the expansions and it remains one of our favorites to this day---we always play with the base Carcassonne game with the Carcassonne - Inns & Cathedrals and Carcassonne - Traders & Builders expansions. Although we've been curious about the other Carcassonne games, as newbies we delayed getting them in favor of trying out other, more different games. Still, Carcassonne: The Castle was the one that interested me the most, since it seemed like the most different from the rest of the series and it had a design spin by the famed Reiner Knizia. The fact that it was exclusively two player didn't really affect us---we think that Carcassonne is a terrific two player couples game and that's how we primarily play it. We finally got a chance to try it and it indeed feels quite different from the main game.
This review focuses on the differences between the regular, base Carcassonne game (including expansions when necessary) and the Castle, and which one is more suitable for the newbie gamer. It assumes a basic knowledge of the traditional Carcassonne gameplay.
Images courtesy of BigWoo and Robotman
What’s Similar
Generally speaking, the gameplay is still Carcassonne. You still draw a tile and place it on the board. You can then potentially claim a feature on the tile with a meeple. When those features are scored, the meeples are returned. Thus, there is a sense of identifying the best place to put the tile as well as a sense of 'meeple management' (how to best maximize the scoring opportunities of your limited set of meeples).
Some more specific similarities:
1. Roads basically play the same function in both games. They score 1 point per tile upon completion. The Inns and Cathedrals expansion for Carcassonne adds the Inn by the Lake feature, which doubles the points of your road. Similarly, the Castle contains a Fountain feature (although they look more like wells) that perform the exact same function. The biggest difference is that most roads in Carcassonne have endpoints when they branch---thus, most roads only have two ends to worry about. In contrast, roads in the Castle can branch without ending the road, so you have to start worrying about finishing a network of roads with multiple endings.
Images courtesy of mpot and josefm
2. The grey “Keeps” in the Castle are similar to “Cities” in Carcassonne. When finished, both give you two points per tile.
Images courtesy of Topdecker and maka
3. The green “Courts” in the Castle are similar to “Fields” in Carcassonne. When you play meeples in these features, they are permanently lost and are only scored at the end of the game. In the base game Carcassonne, these farmer meeples score three points per adjacent city (using the new 3rd edition rules). Meeples in the Courts in the Castle are known as merchants and score three points for every market in that Court. This feels more similar to the field scoring in Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers and is slightly easier to understand than the confusion over the various farmer rules in Carcassonne.
Images courtesy of devine and Skyjoker
4. Some of the bonus tiles in the Castle (see below) give features that are present in some of the expansions to Carcassonne. One of the bonus tiles lets you take another turn, which is similar to the Builder piece in the Traders and Builders expansion to Carcassonne. Another bonus tile lets you score 4 points per market rather than just 3, which is similar to the Pig piece again from the Traders and Builders expansion.
What’s Different
Although part of the Carcassonne line of games, the Castle almost feels like an inverted Carcassonne game. Knizia took most of the original Carcassonne gamplay ideas and turned it on its head, while adding some new unique features.
1. There are no Cloister equivalents in the Castle.
2. There are new red features called Houses. Structurally, they are similar to Keeps but score like Roads (one point per tile). However, there is a running tally over the largest House that you’ve claimed throughout the game. At the end, the player who had the largest completed House gains a bonus. This mechanism feels similar to the Carcassonne - King & Scout expansion, which awards a bonus for the longest road or city completed during the game. In this case, the bonus is points awarded for the largest negative space in the Castle---i.e., one point per tile for the biggest hole in the map. This is another way that the Castle inverts the usual Carcassonne feeling---it can pay to have bigger holes in the map.
3. Unlike regular Carcassonne, at the end of the game you do not score claimed, but uncompleted features. There are bonus tiles that do let you score them (e.g., score uncompleted towers, houses, and roads), but since you can’t count on them, you have to pay more attention your scoring opportunities and make sure to get your meeples back before the end of the game. This makes the meeple management aspect slightly different. Combined with the different tile placement rules and the bonus wall tiles (see below), there are less giant structures in the Castle compared to Carcassonne, as you need to be conscious of completing them more quickly.
4. In the base Carcassonne game, the tiles generally radiate outwards as the French countryside spreads out before you. In contrast, the tiles in the Castle are constrained within the walls, which double as the scoring track. As a result, each tile placement forces the two players closer together, which should result in increased conflict, although we found that this was counteracted by the relaxed tile placement rules (see below).
The wall also contains several bonus tiles that you receive if you get that exact score. In theory, this gives you some incentive to not just build the biggest Keep/Road/House you can, but to get the right amount of points to snag those bonus tiles without going over. There isn’t anything like this in the base game, where it usually pays to build as big as you can get (since you generally even get points for uncompleted features at the end of the game as well). This gives enforces the feeling of constraint and restraint that’s unique to the Castle version.
Image courtesy of rbrockfam
5. This is the BIG one---the tile placement rules are relaxed in the Castle. In the original Carcassonne game, all tiles have to match their all of their edges with all adjacent tiles in order to be placed. This results in relatively intuitive placement that taps into the jigsaw puzzle solving portion of the brain---city edges have to meet up with city edges, roads to roads, fields with fields. In contrast, in the Castle, roads are the only features that have to be matched on the tile edges. So a tower edge can be placed directly next to a house edge. Any tile edge can be placed next to the wall, even the road just ends at the wall.
Image courtesy of Geoff
Especially coming from Carcassonne first, this totally messes with your mind. When you place a tile, you instinctively try to match up the edges. It’s a total paradigm shift in Carcassonne, and while it was probably necessary to counteract the effect of shrinking playing space, it’s not necessarily for the better. Since the tile edges no longer have to match, it can be confusing---my girlfriend kept trying to place tiles that were “shifted by half a tile” rather than the whole edge since many tile edges share half Keep or House features. Aesthetically, this results in a multi-colored jumble compared to the nicer, more attractive flowing art of Carcassonne.
This also makes the Castle feel less thematic. While it may be silly to think about the “theme” of Carcassonne---ultimately, both games are abstract, pattern matching, tile laying games---the gameplay and artwork in Carcassonne does give enough of a feeling of building up the French countryside with your cities and roads. The Castle feels a lot more abstract. Since nothing has to match, no feature really “feels” like a Keep or a House. They could just as well be symbols or patterns that you have to match. It makes the game feel much less personal.
Lastly, one of the main sources of competition in Carcassonne is stealing other people’s features by connecting more of your meeples to it. With the relaxed tile placement rules, one would think it would be easier to steal features in the Castle, but in fact it feels harder since it’s much easier for your opponent to place a tile and just block you out since they can play just about any tile against yours. As a result, this feels like you’re losing a major source of confrontation.
Overall
All in all, there are more things to consider in the Castle. There are more places to put your tile. There are more features to score (Keeps, Roads, Houses, Courts), and you have stricter meeple management since generally you don’t score uncompleted features. You have to be mindful of the overall spatial aspects of the map, particularly with how large or small the biggest hole is. You have to try and get the right score to grab the bonus wall tiles before your opponent. And you still have to try and block and/or steal your opponent’s features at the same time if you can. All of this can add up to a bit of analysis paralysis.
Ultimately, due to this, the base game Carcassonne is more newbie friendly compared to the Castle. It’s more attractive, thematic, less complex, and as a result easier to get into. It’s still a great two player game, but can support more. The base game also has many different expansions that you can mix and match to tailor the gameplay---this may be an advantage or disadvantage depending upon who you ask. In contrast, the Castle only supports two players and demands more of you. On the plus side, it is a standalone game, so it doesn't have any additional essential expansions that you have to buy. However, as newbies gain more experience and look for new games, it’s hard to recommend getting the Castle right away. It’s probably a better investment to get completely different games to try out at that point to explore more of the gaming hobby. In that sense, the Castle is both too different and not different enough to recommend highly to new gamers. The best audience is likely to be experienced gamers looking to go back to a more thoughtful Carcassonne game, or players who are more comfortable with more analytical, abstract games.
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