Carcassonne is a strategy game where you lay tiles to create a medieval landscape of farms, rivers and cities. Each new tile must match the roads, rivers, farms and cities of those around it. As you place it you can claim one of these elements that score points at the end of the game. The map building is simple fun but belies layered tactics to score the most points.

Play involves you picking a random tile and then finding somewhere on the growing map that it can fit. Because you can only claim scoring aspects of the landscape by placing a character piece on the tile you lay, careful consideration of the location is required.

As you progress a battle ensues to claim the most valuable elements (larger cities, farms and longer roads). At the end of the game, the player with the most characters on each of these claims the related points.

This adds complexity to play because you can not place a character on any area already owned by another player's characters. You can, however, place characters on nearby farms, cities or roads, and in a later go add tiles that join these together.

There are many expansions that add new ways to score points for yourself and to foil other players:

• Inns and Cathedrals adds a double-scoring character, and tiles with Inns and Cathedrals that can be placed as part of roads and cities to enhance their value.
• Traders and Builders adds city tiles with collectable goods on them for more points, a pig character to increase the value of fields and a powerful builder character that lets you go again if you extend a city it is placed on.
• The River adds tiles that extend the starting river tile in the game (often included in the base game now).
• The Princess and the Dragon adds magic portal tiles allowing players to place followers on an incomplete feature of previously placed tiles. There's as a volcano and dragon tiles that move the dragon and princess tiles that allow followers to be removed.
• The Tower adds tiles and tower pieces that enable you to capture nearby followers.
• Abbey and Mayor that adds Abbey tiles that can fill in holes in the board and complete features and Mayors who can be placed as followers in cities.
• Wheel of Fortune is a full replacement for the base game with new tiles and characters and a central Wheel of Fortune element that triggers different effects in the game including famine, plague, and fortune, among others.

The result is an inviting game to play because of the maps you create during each session. As you get a handle on the score, however, what emerges is a back-and-forth battle for control of different elements on the map. The winner isn't known until right at the end.