I’ll start by saying that Carcassonne is one of my favourite games of all time. I own most of the expansions but find even just the base game to be endlessly repayable. So I was excited to try out the solo version when it was released a few years back. I’m surprised that it hasn’t received much attention as it is very well designed.
How Does It Play?
You play by selecting 3 colours and using 4 meeples from each colour. Divide the land tiles into 3 stacks, one for each colour.
You then take turns playing a meeple of each colour, drawing and placing a tile following the normal rules. Meeples are also placed according to the normal rules, with two exceptions. Firstly, farmers are not allowed, and crucially you must place a meeple on the tile if you can.
Scoring features works in the familiar way with one very important exception – you only score if the meeple scoring the feature is currently last on the scoring track.
The game continues until you place a tile but have no meeple of the relevant colour available to place on it. There is then a final scoring round.
The full rules for the Carassone Solo Variant can be downloaded for free on the Zman games website.
My Thoughts
The solo rules for Carcassonne work really well. The game is quick to play and presents a difficult challenge. I rarely do very well (I tend to push my luck a little too much and run short of meeples quickly) but I find it very enjoyable. I particularly like how tense the experience is.
Regular Carcassonne achieves this tension not only through the hopeful draw from the bag on your own turn, but also in watching other players’ turns. Will they hijack your city? Will they block off your easiest path to completing a road? Will they pull the one tile you really need yourself?
The solo rules cleverly recreate that ‘other player’ tension. You often find one colour running short of meeples, threatening an early game end. This forces you to momentarily abandon point scoring and focus on bailing that colour out. In fact, most of the game rests on this knife’s edge, making the opportunities to score big, when they arrive, quite risky to grab.
Without these dynamics the solo mode would likely have been a leisurely and rather dull point optimisation experience. I think the design is excellent – the game still feels like Carcassonne, and understands what makes Carcassonne such a great game, but it still has its own distinctive personality.
The solo rules don’t include suggestions for how incorporate any of Carcassonne’s many expansions but do invite you to try. So far I have tried The Shrines and The Fruit Bearing Trees, and am keen to try more – I can imagine that the role of the dragon from Carcassonne Princess and Dragon would be inverted in some interesting ways.
If you own Carcassonne (and really you ought to!) then definitely give the solo rules a go.
