I think I've spoken briefly about Carcassonne before, but we played it for the fifth or so time last night, this time with The River expansion that we hadn't played with before, and it was such a good time that I wanted to wax eloquent about it again. For the record, my wife won again. I think I've won once, but honestly the game is so good I don't care. Carcassonne is an incredible game, providing the most consistently good gameplaying time for my wife and I since .. ever.

I have lots of games, but she likes very few of them. She detests Fluxx now because I always ALWAYS win. I don't know why I win it all the time when we play except that I'm historically really lucky in certain situations. That or she has trouble wrapping her head around the shifting rules of the game. More importantly than not liking to lose much, she doesn't like games where a major strategy is screwing over your opponent, thus nixing the vast majority of games that are available.

For example, in checkers players work to capture one another's pieces. There's no delay when you snap up a piece, it's gone immediately and gone for the rest of that particular match. Winning is directly tied to how many pieces are captured. Othello (aka Reversi) has a similar style of back-and-forth power exchanges. Even though pieces can be returned to your side, the interaction is one where each player is directly assaulting the other each turn. However, Yahtzee, a game where each player is working on their own card to get the best score independently, is a game she likes quite a bit. Did that make sense?

So you see the major dilemma we face in finding good games to play together, since most games seem to depend on direct competition with the other players. Additionally, a lot of my ultra-cool Cheapass Games are too weird for her, even if they don't involve direct conflict. She's not into zombies or racing chariots, you see. I'm not sure why I married her sometimes. That's a big joke, if there's any question.

Back to Carcassonne. Carcassonne is a tile-placing game where smart play does indeed screw over your opponent, but it's much more subtle than, say, checkers, and there's almost always a way to work in another region to catch up in score if you're behind, so there's seldom a clear winner until the last few tiles are placed. There also isn't too much thought involved in making each move. Players can take potential points away from others in Carcassonne if they really work hard at it, but usually players get more points from building their own scoring regions. There's also the possibility of sharing points with other players, scoring equally, from smart building as well. All this reduces that competitive aspect of play to the point where it's very bearable for my wife. Plus players build stuff in the game, which is hugely fun for her. Carcassonne has many ways to score, adding even more to the interest level because there are many choices presented for possible strategies. It's a hell of a good game, with depth, but not too much, and there's also some luck involved in what tiles come up. Take a look at a bigger and much better Carcassonne description over here. Get it and play with friends and family. If you can get the version with the free River addition, do so. The River mixes things up even more, splitting the "board" up but also adding more potentials for play at the same time with very little increase in play time. I doubt we'll be playing without it from here on, and I'm thinking about looking into some of the expansions as well. But it's such a good game by itself, with a fine mix of strategy and luck in a game that plays out in about 45 minutes, that I don't want to mess with it more.

Try it instead of sitting around watching TV sometime, I think you'll find it well worth the investment.