More conflict! This time rather than having your meeples captured by watchtowers they’ll get eaten by a dragon. In The Princess and the Dragon expansion there are various tiles that allow you to move the dragon around the world and it’ll eat anybody it happens to come across. The titular princess allows you to remove meeples from the feature her tiles are placed in. These can be your meeples or your opponents. They make that road or city worth double points upon completion, but you get nothing if you don’t manage to complete the feature by the end of the game. This can lead to some funny “hate-building” where players will deliberately make their opponents features harder to score by adding nasty tiles to it. Because of this aspect this expansion may not be up everybody’s street. You also get a new big meeple to use. This meeple is worth 2 meeples when it comes to totting up who has the most control in any feature when it is scored. 5. Abbey & Mayor It's quite a fun expansion but there are a few things to remember with regards to when you can place acrobats and there is a big swing from the minimum to maximum value of points you can earn per meeple on the big top. This does make it feel a little unfair if one player manages to get a lot of meeples next to a high scoring circus. 9. Bridges, Castles & Bazaars Winner of the Spiel des Jahres on its initial release in 2001, Carcassonne set a new standard for board games. It gave the world Meeples and its deceptively simple, intuitive, mechanics provide a genuine all ages appeal that has helped make Carcassonne one of the success stories of modern board gaming.

The world of Carcassonne Big Box 2022 is filled with all sorts of fascinating new places to visit and people to meet. Featuring a new cover and box art style. Revisit gameplay that is simple enough for newcomers and deep enough to keep veterans playing for ages. The rules have been adapted to the new Carcassonne 3.0 rules. Play the classic version or use the expansions to add unique twists to the gameplay. Carcassonne Big Box 2017 is a perfect starting point for players looking to delve into the world of Carcassonne. Inns and Cathedrals (considered to be an essential addition), Builders and Traders, The Abbot, The River, The Flying Machines, The Ferries, The Messengers, The Gold Mines, Mage & Witch, The Robbers and The Crop Circles.

Points are scored as the map unfolds and features are completed. Investment in farming can provide big points at the end of the game and it’s the player with the most points wins the game. This is the newest expansion to be released and I’ve played with this less than any other expansion with one exception, (we’ll get there). I’ve enjoyed every game I’ve played with this so I would actually expect this to rise up the list if I was asked to redo this list in the future, but for now it’s at number 8. From simple to this beast. Abbey and Mayor adds 3 new types of wooden piece as well as a new tile type. These 3 new pieces are pretty interesting. The Mayor can only go in cities and has the strength equal to the number of pennants in the city. This can be a real gamble as you may end up in a situation where you slap down your mayor and never manage to get a pennant in the city before it’s completed so it has no power and you score nothing. That said it can also become an unstoppable powerhouse that beats everything you throw at it. Carcassonne is a tile-placement game in which the players must draw and place a tile with a piece of southern French landscape on it. The tile might feature a city, a road, a cloister, grassland or some combination thereof, and it must be placed adjacent to tiles that have already been played, in such a way that cities are connected to cities, roads to roads, etcetera. Having placed a tile, the player can then decide to place one of his meeples on one of the areas on it: on the city as a knight, on the road as a robber, on a cloister as a monk, or on the grass as a farmer. When that area is complete, that meeple scores points for its owner. Carcassonne Big Box 2017 contains the original tile-laying classic, Carcassonne, together with a greatest hits collection of no less than 11 of its expansions.

The 2022 version of the Carcassonne Big Box combines the base game along with eleven of its expansions, making it the perfect starter set for anyone who wants to play this bestselling game with as much variety as possible. Including the Inns & Cathedrals, Traders & Builders, The Abbot, The River, The Flying Machines, The Ferries, The Messengers, The Gold Mines, Mage & Witch, The Robbers, and The Crop Circles expansions, the Carcassonne Big Box includes more than 150 tiles and seven different types of meeple. With so many options to choose from, Carcassonne is yours to explore. This version also includes a new cardboard inlay system to cleverly store the tiles and make the box more mobile. Carcassonne has since been released in a variety of editions, including a Star Wars theme, and recently inspired a spin off series of standalone ‘Carcassonne Around the World’ games. Next are the castles. With these you get to place a castle rather than scoring points for a 2-tile city. Instead of scoring points you now get to score points for whatever adjacent feature is scored next. This can have you making bank. But a clever opponent will finish some low scoring feature first to keep you out of their juicy, high scoring city. It’s fun and can be quite tactical. Now, for me Traders and Builders is an essential expansion. This expansion adds a new builder player piece as well as some goods tokens. The builder can be placed instead of one of your meeples and then if you ever expand the feature you’ve placed your builder on, you get another turn. Brilliant stuff. You also have these trade goods which are found within the city spaces. The player who completes that city gets to take all of the goods found within that city. Then at the end of the game if you own the most of any particular good you get some bonus points.

The world of Carcassonne Big Box 2022 is filled with all sorts of fascinating new places to visit and people to meet.