Carcassonne

Publisher: TheCodingMonkeys.
Price: £2.99 (buy now)
Version reviewed: iPhone, by nofi.

Carcassonne is an object lesson in how to convert a board game into an iPhone App.  Carcassonne, though, isn’t quite as popular as other games and so the trick here, which TheCodingMonkeys have pulled off with sheer class and confidence, is to make the thing both accessible to newcomers whilst simultaneously ensuring that hardcore Meeple lovers will be able to jump straight in and use the same tacticts they’d use with the real thing.

Carcassonne is a game based around drawing cards, which may contact part of a road, a section of a walled city or a self contained cloister, and playing them down on a grid which slowly, between the efforts of up to five players, forms a considerable portion of a country.  Points are gained when the player forms complete roads (that join two places, or create a loop), complete cities or when a cloister is encased in 8 touching tiles all around it.

That is, assuming you’ve placed one of your seven Meeples (little men, representing ownership of that part of the game) on the city, road or cloister.  If you have, the points are yours – if not, they’re someone elses.  If you get the points, you also get your Meeples back so you can play them again, so it’s a delicate mix of building parts of the map and ensuring you own the bits you need to own to get the points.  You can also place Meeples in fields, but points for those areas aren’t added until the game is over, which happens once the last tile is drawn from the pack.

It’s brilliant, in case you’ve not played it before – it’s a really deep game and if you’re playing against someone of skill you’ll need to be thinking several steps ahead at all times.  Thankfully, this brand new iPhone version offers a number of difficulty levels for the solo player (in addition to both local and internet based multiplayer) in which you can challenge up to four other AI-controlled players as you all battle for territory.

And whilst the computer players do a great job, it’s the interface that’s the real star here.  From lucious tutorials (both audio and text based) through to intuitive in-game menus, TheCodingMonkeys have done a superb job with the user experience.  Pinching zooms, scrolling scrolls, the tiles auto rotate, invalid squares are marked as such – everything you’d want to happen just seems to happen which gives the impression of ridiculously high production values and a considerable effort in the testing department.

In addition to the main game, there’s also a ‘Solitaire’ mode, which presents an alternative set of rules to accomodate a single player in which he must start off building small worlds (with towns and roads) and work his way up to a six-tile city and a six-tile road.  It’s a neat diversion in an already feature-packed game which sports iPhone 4 Retina graphics, simple but endearing music and high score tables.

In short, then, if you’re looking for something a little deeper than the usual fluff on the App Store, Carcassonne is your tonic – beautiful, rich and seemingly build with sincerity, love and care.

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• Graphics: 9
• Sound: 6
• Gameplay: 10
• Overall: 9
  Reader rating:
  
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