Xbox Live Arcade has long been home to a number of great titles, both old and new, that are well worth the price of admission. Games like Pac-Man Championship Edition, Puzzle Quest, Geometry Wars and Alien Hominid HD are among the great games you can find on the service… but can a digital board game make this list as well?
The answer is a resounding yes, thanks mostly to Carcassonne. If you didn’t pick up the game for free during the Xbox Live is 5ive celebration in North America, Carcassonne is still a game well worth your MS Points.
Based off a German board game created by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede that was named after a historic fortified city in southern France, Carcassonne is a tile-based board game where the goal is to score as many points as possible. Each player is granted seven followers and takes turns placing tiles on the map out of a group of 71 titles, minus the “starter tile.” Placing the followers in cities, on roads, or in monasteries before they are complete is the only way to gain points during play. However, more points may be scored at the end of the game for incomplete roads, cities and monasteries, as well as any fields in which a player has a follower.
So, how well does this translate to the Xbox 360? Playing Carcassonne is rather simple and quick to pick up on. The game features tutorials to help you out if you’re stuck, but they probably won’t need to be used too often, as the learning curve in Carcassonne is manageable for gamers of all types. As for controls, they are once again simple and easy to pick up on, which only benefits the title. The scoring is perhaps the only complicated part of Carcassonne’s game play, but in time, you’ll learn all the ins and outs of scoring, too.
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