Carcassonne: Xbox Windows Phone Review

People living exterior of France tin can probably be forgiven for a lack of familiarity with the real-life town of Carcassonne and its historical significance. According to my best friend Wikipedia, the town was fortified by walls and was strategic meaning from most 100 BC to 1659. Fast-forward to the year 2000 and a German board game designer named Klaus-Jürgen Wrede created a game most building medieval cities and kingdoms by the same proper noun. The single console adaptation of Carcassonne to date has been the XBLA version, which came along in 2007 from Sierra Online. German developer Exozet Games created their own version for Android and Blackberry in 2022, which they've now adapted to Windows Telephone.

Gameplay

In a game of Carcassonne, two-6 players take turns placing tiles on the board. Tiles must be connected to a tile that has already been placed, and the features of each new tile must marshal with any tile it will be connected to. In other words, grass must connect to grass, road to road, etc. The game ends when all 72 tiles (or more than if playing with an expansion) have been placed.

Tiles may contain iv basic features:

• Metropolis: Building cities (and scoring from them) is the main goal of the game. Some city tiles have blue medallions; these increase the point payout of the city. Cities are considered completed when they are entirely walled off by edge pieces. Upon completion, the player receives points based on the size of the urban center and his or her follower is returned. Incomplete cities provide a smaller number of points at the stop of the game.
• Road: Like cities, players receive points and get their followers dorsum later on completing a route. Roads don't pay every bit much merely still provide a reliable source of points.
• Cloister: 'Cloister' is a British give-and-take that I was unfamiliar with before playing the game; the XBLA version calls them monasteries. These are single tiles which must be completely surrounded by eight other tiles in order to receive your points and follower back.
• Field: Each tile contains at least one of the previous features, but most besides take fields. By placing a follower on a field, the role player will receive points for each field that connects to it without being divided by roads. Withal, the follower does not get returned to histrion until the game ends, so seek score from fields judiciously.

Afterward placing your tile during a turn, y'all may opt to identify one of your seven followers on that tile. Followers are the simply way to get score, so you'll demand to use them wisely, holding on to them at times. Tie upward all of your followers with incomplete cities and you won't become plenty points to win.

Competition

Once y'all chief the full general gameplay and scoring system of Carcassonne, yous can start to learn how to compete against your opponents rather than ignoring them and doing your own thing. For instance, a skilled player tin make information technology hard or impossible for another player to terminate a city by placing certain tiles near the metropolis.

My favorite way to mess with opponents is by stealing cities or forcing them to share points. Run across, if the enemy has an incomplete metropolis or road with a follower on information technology, you can't merely build off of that structure by directly placing your own tile and follower adjacent to it. Instead, yous demand to identify the same type of tile and your follower at least one title abroad.

Once y'all've done that, yous're free to place a connecting tile betwixt the two like structures. Upon completion of the structure, both players will share the score for it. But if y'all manage to get more followers on the same structure than the enemy (by connecting non-adjacent pieces with followers), y'all'll steal the construction from the other player. Tough to exercise, but very satisfying.

Expansions

This version of Carcassonne includes 'The River II' expansion, which can be toggled on or off earlier starting a game. 'The River Ii' consists of 12 tiles that must be played before the core tiles come up. The tiles grade a long river, with a volcano tile played at the end. This expansion makes for more interesting geography, merely too adds to the game's already lengthy play time, so I doubt many players will brand use of it afterward unlocking its Accomplishment.

Unmarried-Player

Since board games aren't commonly fun to play by one's self, some videogame developers add new single-actor modes to compensate, such as the Survival Horror mode in Zombies!!!. I hear the iOS version of Carcassonne (developed by TheCodingMonkeys, not Exozet) has its ain sectional single-player style - though, to be fair, it sells for x bucks instead of iii. The WP7 version just allows players to select from a pool of xi AI opponents and play a standard game. Playing against the computer can be fun, but the lack of a metagame really hurts the long-term single-player value.

Multiplayer

Carcassonne offers both laissez passer-and-play and online multiplayer. Pass-and-play works well and could certainly provide entertainment should you and a few friends find yourselves stuck somewhere without a gaming panel or physical board game to play.

Sadly, online multiplayer is a complete bust. Up to half-dozen people tin can play together, which sounds great in theory. Merely all six players must join a lobby at the same fourth dimension because Carcassonne doesn't properly support asynchronous multiplayer. After everyone has played their first turns, they no longer need to remain online simultaneously.  Even the game's matchmaking feature, much like its inviting organisation, requires the host and at least one other thespian to wait for a game simultaneously. In my experience, I never institute a game – and who would want to sit with their phones running for minutes or hours on end in hopes of getting a game going? In fact, when I tried to host a public game, my screen repeatedly timed out before anyone could join.

I did manage to start a multiplayer game past inviting a friend. This requires much coordination exterior of the game due to the annoying timing issue. Even then, the game's server is absolutely terrible. I couldn't invite my friend for over x minutes because the game only wouldn't connect to Xbox Alive, even though its leaderboard connected just fine. Once nosotros finally started our game, nosotros both got disconnected after a few minutes of playing. You can resume a created game without the other person being online and make a motility, but once again, y'all'll fight the loathsome server problems each fourth dimension you attempt to resume. Too, there is no manner to communicate in-game - an essential feature for any online multiplayer game.

Photograph courtesy of TNTJudbud

Information technology's both disappointing and confusing that Exozet would choose a console-similar multiplayer and matchmaking setup instead of true asynchronous multiplayer similar the vast majority of multiplayer phone games use. Yous may be able to coordinate an online game with a friend or ii, merely the need to be at that place simultaneously makes no sense and the server issues exacerbate an already terrible setup.

Update: The server problems have now been somewhat fixed by Microsoft.

Achievements

Several of the Achievements involve fun things like building a 9 tile metropolis or stealing a metropolis from an opponent similar I described earlier. On the downside, in that location are two online Achievements: one for winning a game and another for winning a 6-player game. The corporeality of coordination required to fill upward a half dozen-player game is ridiculous, and everyone would need to stick around for six games if they all wanted the Accomplishment.

Two grinding Achievements are even worse: play 200 games and accumulate 15,000 points beyond all games played. If you earn an average of 100 points a game, it will have 150 games to get the score-based one. Games terminal at least thirty minutes, so it will take an agonizing minimum of 100 hours to complete 200 of them. I like Carcassonne but I don't want to spend the rest of my life playing against the AI for a measly couple of Achievements!

Overall Impression

The core game of Carcassonne is fantastic. Exozet has washed a fine job of translating the mechanics to Windows Phone. They fifty-fifty include both a set up of tutorials and a total reference text to assist players acquire. One complaint: the check button, used to advance text and ostend moves, does not always take my taps (mostly during the tutorials). How hard is that to get right?

Still, the poorly-conceived multiplayer and cut-rate servers are the real issues with this accommodation. I can hop onto the XBLA version in the evening and find people to play against within minutes (never getting disconnected), but nobody will e'er find an opponent with this version's matchmaking. If an update was to add together asynchronous multiplayer and matchmaking and solve the server woes, Carcassonne would become a must-purchase for lath game fans. Until and so, the prospect of playing by and large unmarried-thespian should exist weighed heavily before purchasing.

Carcassonne – Windows Phone 7 and 8 – 45 MB - $ii.99 – Store Link

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/carcassonne

Posted by: autennoter2002.blogspot.com

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