Carcassone is what I consider to be one of the “Big Three” of boardgames (along with Settlers of Catan, and Ticket to Ride). Carcassone is a tile placement game that sees the players taking turns creating a interconnected board of a medieval french landscape with cities, roads, inns, or monasteries.
Carcassone is a very easy 2-5 player game that takes around 45 minutes to complete. Its one of the first introdutions for many people of “worker placement” games where you have a limited number of workers, so you need to make each worker you place impactful. These workers are how you score points and once they score points you get them returned to you. From this a basic strategy can be formed of “If i put my worker down, I want to make sure it scores points so I can get it back”. This idea makes it really easy for new players to pick it up because they immedietly have some direciton of how to play.
Carcassone doesn’t hit the table as much as it used to, but when I first started getting interested In boardgames this was a frequent pick. So much so I even started playing “Double Carcassone” which is just the same game but twice as many tiles. Carcassone also has a wealth of exapansions each which modify the game in someway to score more points, add new tiles, or change the mechanics. These are a great addition when the game starts to get stale.
I can’t not recommend this game as it really is a classic, however if you are looking for something involved and with strategic depth this game is not for you. This game is a perfect socialize and talk game as at the end of the day it comes down to very basic strategy and luck of the draw.