Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede

Carcassonne is a great game, but honestly gets old and simple after a while. Since then, there have been several derivatives of the game, most of which are as good or better. Carcassone: the City is my favorite.

Player take turns placing tiles. If they complete a feature (such as houses, roads, castles or markets), they score it. Very Carcassonne.

Interesting Mechanic: The Wall. In the base Carcassonne, the city may grow organically in any direction. This is not the case in The City. Once you are a third of the way through the game, completing and scoring a feature allows players to extend the city wall around the city from the gate. This constrains your building option, and forces completion of features for scoring. Players can also put guards on the wall, which scores for players based on the number of special features they see.

The tile-laying game is a simple, intuitive genre and the wall adds a new, interesting scoring mechanic to it which also helps to constrain the building and push the game to the end. This game is both simpler and yet more strategically interesting than base Carcassonne, and has a very satisfying table presence.

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(Photo Credit: Cardboard & Wood)