Shannon Appelcline

The collected columns of Shannon Appelcline, from those that first appeared on Gone Gaming to his current writings every other Thursday on BGN. Here's what Shannon has to say about himself:

Shannon Appelcline is a writer, reviewer, computer programmer, and casual game designer who enjoys Eurogames, role-playing games, and any number of other entertainments. He started playing Eurogames several years ago, by way of doing research for a computer game design that never came to be, but the Eurogames turned out to be a frequent entertainment.

In Gone Gaming at Boardgame News, Shannon writes about the industry, discusses games, talks about design, and takes a closer look at specific designers. The focus is sometimes eclectic, but it's usually analytical and thoughtful.

You can also read Shannon's writing scattered across the net. Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities is his other current column, focusing on computer game design, writing, and community. He also administers the sites RPGnet and Xenagia. You can find his board game reviews at the first and columns and other discussions at both.

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Headlines May 15, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Dice Games, Part Two: Just the Stats, Ma’am May 1, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Dice Games, Part One: Mechanical Evolution April 17, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Helping Losers April 3, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Whose Job Is It? March 20, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Small Press Interviews: Eye-Level Entertainment March 6, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: RIP, Gary Gygax February 28, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: The Expansion Game, Part Two: Bane or Boon? February 14, 2008 - Kimberly Appelcline: A Wife’s Perspective January 31, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: The Expansion Game, Part One: The History January 17, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Brass Tacks January 3, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Greatest Hits December 20, 2007 - Shannon Appelcline: To Every Thing, There is a Season …

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Articles

Shannon Appelcline: Dice Games, Part Two: Just the Stats, Ma’am

It’s a Dice Fest!

That’s an oft-seen complaint on certain internet bulletin boards whose readers think that all games should be entirely strategic, with no chance for random elements to intrude upon carefully made plans.  If that’s really the sort of game that you like, then no problem. But, don’t buy blindly into the concept. I think dice games can provide a lot of benefits that you don’t find in a “less” random game, the greatest of which is the visceral and encompassing joy that can fill you when you receive an unlikely, but badly needed roll. Besides that, if you’re wanting to simulate reality in any form, then you need to accept that randomness happens. Just ask Hillary Clinton or Constable Charles d’Albret (of Agincourt).

This isn’t to say that a good dice game is totally random. Instead, it uses additional mechanics to turn that luck into another game element that can be controlled by a good player--which is the topic of this week’s article.

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Shannon Appelcline: Dice Games, Part One: Mechanical Evolution

I’m going to be the first one to officially call it: 2008 is the Year of the Dice (at least in the slightly delayed American market).  I think To Court the King (2006) really got the current trend going, but since its release we’ve seen several notables including Kingsburg (2007), Airships (2007), and The Catan Dice Game (2007).  Going by other publications like Alhambra: The Dice Game (2006) and the forthcoming Ra: The Dice Game (2008?) I’m starting to think that every board game is going to have a dice game too.

Thus, I’ve decided to start a multi-part look at dice games. This week I’m going to concentrate on the mechanics by looking at how dice games have been played over the last several decades and how those general mechanics have evolved over time. Then in future articles I’m going to look at how to control the randomness of dice and I’m going to review several of the most notable games.

As a final tease for this week’s article, let me say that if you keep on reading, there’s a neat diagram toward the end.

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Shannon Appelcline: Helping Losers

What’s the worst part about losing?

Unless you’re playing in some gladiatorial win-or-die type arena battle, it’s probably the experience of knowing you’re going to lose, then having to play on for hours more. As you’d expect the problem gets worse both the longer a game is and the more strategic (and less random) a game is.

Fortunately, many games have catch-up mechanisms built into them. They’re generally an element that I appreciate greatly in games. On the other hand, you also have to be pretty careful. Between El Grande (a game which is overly tense because of the catchup mechanism) and Liberte (a game which I recently played where I admired the catchup mechanism), there’s room for both bad and good, and that’s what I’m going to talk about this week.

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Shannon Appelcline: Whose Job Is It?

Last Saturday I played my best game of Reiner Knizia’s Taj Mahal ever. I finished the game with 63 points, pretty rare in my experience of 5-player games and pretty far ahead of everyone else.

I’d like to think that much of victory came due to good play. I did my best to optimize my hand, built a great set of connections that scored me 1+2+3+4+5+6+7 points over the course of the game, quickly gained the +2 yellow bonus card, and held it for half the game.

However, I also think there was another major factor in my win: No one stopped me.

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Shannon Appelcline: Small Press Interviews: Eye-Level Entertainment

Now is a great time to be a small-press game publisher. Printing is both reasonably priced and high quality. Thus, even if you don’t license your games to Kosmos, Rio Grande, or Mayfair, you can choose to self-publish a game of entirely professional quality. We’ve been seeing this trend for years on the European side of things. Doris & Frank, Richard Breese, and Andrea Meyer are just a few of the German publishers who self-publish well-beloved games.

Meanwhile, over in the United States, there have been small-press publishers ever since the hobbyist game movement got really rolling in the 1970s with miniatures, war games, and RPGs. However in recent years we’re seeing something different: US small-press publishers that are publishing more European-style games.

This week I’ve talked with one of the small-press publishers that’s caught my eye, Eye-Level Entertainment, producers of Nature of the Beast and E.T.I..

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Shannon Appelcline: RIP, Gary Gygax

On Tuesday, March 4, 2008 Ernest Gary Gygax passed away. He was the designer of Dungeons & Dragons as well as several older miniature games and several newer RPGs. After some problems in the 1980s when he was forced out of TSR--the company he created--Gary Gygax was able to rediscover his place in the roleplaying world. In the last twenty years of his life he was widely recognized and lauded as the old gentleman of gaming. In the last decade he participated on the Internet in many forums and well knew how much he was loved and appreciated by his fans. That’s more than most of us can ask for in life.

Today I mourn Gary Gygax, because he’s quite simply, the reason I game.

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Shannon Appelcline: The Expansion Game, Part Two: Bane or Boon?

Four weeks ago, I wrote about gaming expansions, positing a history for them that I really believe is how they came to be. Having thus examined the question of how gaming expansions exist, I’d like to talk about a more philosophical question: should they?

This surely isn’t the first time that I’ve talked about whether gaming expansions were good or bad. In my Carcassonne articles, I discussed how much the various expansions--particularly the latter ones--have messed up the core game play, while in a discussion of Memoir ‘44, I talked about how much I admired the system of scenarios, something that has now been carried across several supplements.

So, there’s good and bad, and when I answer the general question of whether gaming expansions are a bane or a boon, I generally have to say yes.

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Kimberly Appelcline: A Wife’s Perspective

This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I asked my wife to write an article for Boardgame News. Though Kimberly enjoys the occasional game, she’s by no means a serious gamer. Thus she offers a unique perspective on what games your loved one might enjoy. So, consider this a guide to games you might play with your non-gaming-spouse-or-girlfriend this Valentine’s Day, and an insight into why those or other games might be enjoyable. You might even print it out and give to them, so that they can decide for themselves if any of the games sound fun.

As for us, maybe we’ll play some Carcassonne or Lost Cities after a nice dinner out tonight at our favorite Cajun restaurant.

I’ll now turn things over to my wife:

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Shannon Appelcline: The Expansion Game, Part One: The History

What was the first gaming expansion? I’m sure that if you looked back to the 1930s and 1940s you could find some amateur Monopoly supplements.  Likewise, I wouldn’t be surprised if amateur Diplomacy supplements appeared in the 1960s. For professional publications, it’s obvious that things got going even later. You can find some linked games as early as 1973, when GDW began their “Europa” series. SPI’s North Africa Quad of four games similarly appeared in 1976. However, the surge of true gaming expansions appeared in 1977, when SPI put out its two supplements for War of the Ring and Avalon Hill supplemented their Win, Lose & Show game.

I’m sure there’s a few scattered earlier expansions that one could dredge up, and I welcome your comments on them, but I think that 1977 is a pretty good starting point for when gaming expansions became a professional business.

And, as part of an overall look at expansions in gaming, I’m going to tell you why.

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Shannon Appelcline: Brass Tacks

Brass was Martin Wallace’s last board game release of 2007. Moving away from his war gaming themes of recent years, Brass instead returns Wallace to his most successful area of design: logistical gaming. This time he’s focused the game on his native Britain, detailing the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire—which is to say northwestern England.

I was really wowed by Brass when I first played it. It’s rare that a game of this length and complexity has me returning for more, but the economic modeling and strategies of Brass are both unique enough that I thought they deserved the attention. And thus it’s those exact two topics that I’m going to be looking into in more depth today.

If you’re not familiar with Brass, I invite you to take a look at my review of the game, which as usual contains an extensive description of how it plays. Or, if you prefer, you can read Greg J. Schloesser’s review right here at BGN. But now, let’s get down to the brass tacks of Brass.

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Shannon Appelcline: Greatest Hits

Hello to Boardgame News! I’ve been writing about board and card games for a few years now, over at Gone Gaming, with those articles all soon to be available on BGN itself. However, since there’s doubtless people here who haven’t seen the GG articles, I thought I’d use this first entry of 2008 to introduce myself and my work.

First, about myself. I’m a writer and a computer programmer. Professionally I run the Skotos Online Game site as well as entertainment sites RPGnet and Xenagia. Game design has always been one of my interests. I have a long running column about computer game design, and when I started writing board & card game reviews, game design and analysis were my focuses there too. Not surprisingly, game design has been a focus in my Gone Gaming articles, but you’ll also find reviews, rants, and looks at the industry.

What follows are three of my favorite articles/series from the last two hand a half years.

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Shannon Appelcline: To Every Thing, There is a Season …

It’s two and a half years now since Coldfoot sent me an email asking if I’d like to contribute to a new group boardgaming blog that he was putting together. I’ll admit to being a bit passive aggressive about that initial invite, because I was feeling very busy at the time.

I was obsessively working on a CCG design for a game based on the Stargate: SG-1 TV show. It didn’t end up going anywhere, but it sure took up a lot of my time in July and August of 2005. I was also writing scripts for some comic books (though actually the script that was on my desk that Summer was for Castle Marrach #2 which didn’t get produced either, as my very reasonably priced and high-quality artist ended up too busy to make a longer term commitment).

Nonetheless, after sitting on Brian’s email for a few weeks, I finally mailed him back--just in time, I suspect--and told him I’d be happy to be on board, but could only commit to writing every other week.

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Shannon Appelcline: Who Goes Next?

Who goes next?

In a mass-market game, that wasn’t really much of a question, because in Monopoly, Scrabble, Chess, or any number of other traditionals, the answer was always obvious: the next player.

However, as games continue to evolve, adding on new levels of complexity, the answer is becoming more difficult, and the question of who goes next isn’t always so obvious.

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Shannon Appelcline: Knizia-thon, Part Two: Obscurity & Palazzo

Last week I played my second game of Palazzo for the year. I own the game, but it very rarely makes it into my game night bag, hence the low play count. I couldn’t really place my finger on why until last Wednesday’s game.

The game ended like this:

I’d been doing kind of moderately well throughout the game: not best and not worst. On what was likely to be my last turn I had a pristine 5-story white-marble building with tons of windows, a mixed-material 3-story building and a mixed-material 2-story building.

Now in Palazzo, for those of you unfamiliar, you score points based on how tall your building is and what it’s made out of. The core score for a 3-story building is the number of windows it contains, but there are bonuses of +3 and +6 when you reach 4 or 5 stories and those bonuses are doubled if the building is made of a single material.

The result is, unfortunately, very difficult to intuit, and this really showed in last Wednesday’s game.

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Shannon Appelcline: Knizia-thon, Part One: Marco Polo Expedition v. Blue Moon City

As I’ve played an increasing number of German games, I’ve increasingly grown fond of those by Reiner Knizia. Sure, he’s the big grand poobah of German gaming, and he designs more games than most small countries, but I’ve discovered that I like his games because they’re just more fun for me than a lot of what I play.

To some extent this surprises me, because they’re pretty analytical and pretty mathematical, neither of which matches my definition of fun, but of everything I play they’re the ones I come back to the most.

I came to this realization late last year, so this year I’ve set out to play as much Knizia as a I can. I’d hope to have a pile of Knizian nickles by year’s end, and though that hasn’t come about, I’ve still managed quite a few plays.

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Shannon Appelcline: Tie Breakers

Last week, when playing Thurn & Taxis, we momentarily thought we had a tie. (Momentarily, I say, because I added up my 21 points of chips and got 19, but that’s neither here nor there.) This inevitably led us back to the rulebook for the perennial question, “What breaks ties?”

In Thurn & Taxis the first answer was, “the player who earned the ‘game end’ bonus tile’”, which makes a lot of sense, because that’s a definitive goal that players should usually be going for. However, the second tie-breaker, didn’t make sense, because it was, “if [the person with the tile] was not among those tied, the player closest clockwise from this player who was tied with the most is the winner!”

So Thurn & Taxis, to offer a reminder, works like this: when a player goes out, play continues until all players have had an equal number of turns, and thus ends to the right of the start player. This means that unless the last player is the one who went out, the winner is a player who was advantaged because he had more of an opportunity to react to the game ending, which seemed to me to be the opposite of what the tie-breaker should have been. I suggested that going counter-clockwise from the ending player would have worked better, because that would have been a player more likely to be disadvantaged, which led me to a general pondering about how tie breakers should be written.

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Shannon Appelcline: Adventure Games, Part Four: Talisman vs. Runebound

As we near the end of September, the release of the new, fourth edition of Talisman is just a few days away, and thus I’ve decided to take the opportunity to return to an old series of articles that I’ve written on adventure games, and compare how the old relates to the new.

A Brief History of Talisman

First, a brief history of Talisman. Although it was by no means the earliest adventure game--that accolade probably going to TSR’s Dungeon! (1975)--it was the first that was really, greatly successful.

Talisman’s first edition was released by Games Workshop in 1983. It was shortly thereafter followed by a better quality, but otherwise similar second edition. These games had the same core ideas: you played a unique character who you could improve by gaining Strength, Craft, and items. You tried to get enough power to make your way to the center of the board, then kill all the other players through the magical Crown of Command.

Talisman’s success was probably most notable because of the fact that it was very well supplemented. First up were the Talisman Expansion Set (1986) and Talisman: The Adventure (1986). Many others expansions followed, offering up new characters, new boards, new cards, and generally new adventures.

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Shannon Appelcline: Card Games & Randomness

Recently my Thursday night gaming group has had the opportunity to play some top quality card games, among them Tichu and the German Doppelkopf. Comparing and talking about these games led to interesting discussions of the the element of randomness in card games, which I offer up here for additional thoughts and comments.

The Heart of Randomness

Our conversation got started with one of players saying that Doppelkopf was too random.

The thing is, however, that almost any card game is random. It’s a necessary and implicit part of the process. You take 52 cards (or whatever) and divide them up among the players. For a standard 4-player game that represents 635,013,559,600 different possibilities. In other words, sometimes you’re going to get a really bad hand and sometimes you’re going to get a really good one.

That’s life. Or at least a card game.

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Shannon Appelcline: Arthur! Arthur!

Recently the folks over at Green Ronin Publishing published Hobby Games: The 100 Best, a book of essays about 100 top hobby games, be they RPGs, board games, card games, or wargames.

I was very pleased to have the editor, James Lowder, ask me to participate. I mean, any day when you get to write an essay for a book introduced by Reiner Knizia is a pretty good one. We talked a bit about what I’d write an essay on and we agreed upon King Arthur Pendragon, an Arthurian roleplaying game that’s one of my favorites because of the veracity with which it represents the Malorian legends.

I highly encourage you all to check out the book via the link above. In the meantime, in honor of its publication, I’ve decided to dedicate this column to its publication by looking at the board game side of what I covered there: the Matter of Britain.

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Shannon Appelcline: A Roleplaying Interlude

As I’ve written before in this column, my first love was always roleplaying games. Though I’m sure I played games like Stratego and Twixt before I ever touched an RPG, it’s the roleplaying games that I really remember playing throughout my youth.

Dungeons & Dragons was the first, but there are many games beyond that, and even before I moved to Berkeley for college I played a decent share of them including the science-fiction game Traveller; Stormbringer and Hawkmoon, both based on the works of Michael Moorcock; and RuneQuest, a fantasy game that I found odd at the time, and that I’ve grown much more enamored of since.

In the last couple of years I’ve grown closer to roleplaying games again. My best friend and long-time gamemaster left the country, and so I stepped up to run a regular game, something I hadn’t done in several years, and that rekindled an interest in me. Board and card games are still my largest recreation today, but RPGs are there every week, and they get an increasing amount of my enthusiasm.

So, with all those things said, I’m going to take a bit of time today and talk about RPGs--from the perspective of board gaming.

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Shannon Appelcline: Wiz-War Expansion Cards

This week I’m going to do something I haven’t done before. I’m publishing an expansion for an existing game, Tom Jolly’s Wiz-War.

As I’ve written elsewhere Wiz-War was a much beloved game of my ‘tweens. I suspect it was the most played board game for my group throughout the later 1990s. As we played it more and more we also developed a rule: we added one new card every time we played a game. This was made possible thanks to Chessex putting out blank card packs.

So I offer you up all the bonus cards from my set, with no (or rather, few) comments on whether they’re good or bad. I’ll also offer the caveat that if you’re going to add cards, you should put in more numbers too, to keep things balanced. Just follow the normal distribution from the base game. We also put in duplicates of some of the more common spells (which I hopefully didn’t copy any of below).

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Shannon Appelcline: Parlaying Success

A couple of months ago I played several hands of Parlay. This is a Poker/word-game that I reviewed last year. I thought it was excellent then, and even though I couldn’t put together a decent word to save my life in this recent game, I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

Parlay has a unique mechanism whereby you collect a hand of 7 cards from a normal 52-card deck, with each card also featuring a letter. Then you try and simultaneously put together a top-rate 5-card Poker hand and a good word of up to 7 letters.

After each player has assembled his final hand of cards, he then decides whether to stay (betting that he has a better total hand value than anyone else) or fold.

If a player folds he earns points equal to the value of the letters he used to form his word, and then he’s out. If you have a decent ability to form words you can get 50 points a hand just by doing this.

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Shannon Appelcline: Economics, Technology, Philosophy, and Law

There’s an old joke that goes like this:

“I’m running a store, but I lose money on every product I sell!!”
“So how do you stay in business?”
“Volume!”

This article is about gaming and all those things that appear in the header: economics, technology, philosophy, and law. It’s more about the roleplaying industry, which is having a tough time in the modern market, but a lot of the discussion could apply to Eurogaming as well--particulaly the niche sort of Eurogaming that we’re more likely to enjoy that’s less family-oriented, more strategic, and thus less likely to appeal to the mass market.

So accept my caveat that they may not apply 100% to the normal topics of this column, but nonetheless I think it’s related.

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Shannon Appelcline: Five Game Design Don’ts

If you’re designing a game, here’s a short list of five things that you shouldn’t do:

Don’t Reward the Last Man Standing. This is one of the things that Eurogames do right, so it scarcely needs to be said any more. However, it’s still an important point. Unless your game is really short, you shouldn’t allow player elimination, and you especially shouldn’t decide who wins your game based on the same. After all, what are the eliminated players supposed to do until the game ends?

Although, as I said, most Eurogames don’t use last-man-standing mechanics, nonetheless there are some who allow players to be effectively eliminated. Mare Nostrum is an example of this from the warfare side of things: you can get to a sufficiently bad state that you just don’t have the resources to come back. Likewise there are any number of games where you can look at your score and quickly realize that you have no chance of winning.

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Shannon Appelcline: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Part Two: Three Mini Reviews

Over at Skotos I’m continuing my work on Xenagia, our new science-fiction, fantasy, and horror community. Thus these three genres remain foremost in my mind, and I’m continuing my series here discussing them. If you missed it, you should read my first article on this topic, which covered history and ten top games in the genres.

(I’ve got one more article planned, for two weeks from now.)

The interesting thing about the fantasy, science-fiction, and horror genres is how completely they describe hobbyist game production in the United States from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. Aside from historical military conflicts, if a hobbyist game came out in the United States, the odds were at least 50/50 that it was a genre game. I still have about half a bookshelf full of Dragon Pass, The Riddle of the Ring, Dune, Kings & Things, Hacker, and other similar games from this period.

However there were always three games that really stood out to me as the definitive American hobbyist games, and which got much love and play over the years until I discovered Eurogames: Cosmic Encounter, Illuminati, and Wiz-war. I played all three for the first time in college and they largely defined my gameplaying for a decade. They’ve now all fallen out of favor, especially by crowds won over by Eurogames, but they’re still worth a look, so here’s my thoughts on them:

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Shannon Appelcline: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Part One: A History and Ten Top Games

In my real life I work for Skotos Tech, an online gaming company that’s increasingly becoming an online entertainment company. Our newest site, which I launched last week, is Xenagia, a community site all about fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Thus far we’ve got a forum and a book index, with plans to add reviews in a couple of weeks.

(And, if you’re interested in the topics, please stop on by, as we’re working hard to create a community, particularly on the forums.)

Because of my work on Xenagia, I’ve been largely immersed in these three genres over the last couple of weeks, and that’s what led to this article, talking about science-fiction and fantasy (and to a lesser extent, horror) in gaming.

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Shannon Appelcline: Burning Freeways and Blind Bids! (Or: Real Life Auctions)

A week and a half ago a major interchange in the California Bay Area literally melted in a hellish inferno.  Following a single-vehicle tanker truck crash, over eight thousand gallons of gasoline lit on fire, resulting in temperatures in excess of 2750° bathing the freeway.  The metal frames holding the I-580 overpass together began to warp, and then one segment of the overpass came down in a thundering crash.

As part of the infamous MacArthur Maze (which I pass through every week on a BART train on my way to EndGame and back), the I-580 overpass was a central part of the road system which moved traffic between the East Bay and San Francisco, and suddenly it was gone.  Dire predictions were made on the effects on traffic. Thus far, it’s apparently been bad, but not terrible thanks to Bay Area companies’ willingness to allow employees to telecommute and our decent public transit system.

Nonetheless, the I-580 overpass needs to rebuild and quickly. How can you find the company that could do it the quickest and cheapest? The answer was ... an auction.

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Shannon Appelcline: Elegent Games, Elegent Components

Remember back to days of playing Monopoly? Did you ever actually read the rules? For myself I’m pretty sure the answer is, “No”, because in more recent years when I have gone back and looked at the venerable Monopoly rules, they looked entirely unfamiliar to me.

There’s a reason for that.

Now, I would never be one to call Monopoly an elegant game, but the Parker brothers did know how to do one thing right: they made good use of their components. In Monopoly‘s case, practically everything you need to know about playing the game is right there on the board and the cards.

“Collect $200.00 Salary as You Pass Go” the Start space says boldly. “Community Chest,” another space states. “Follow Instruction on Top Card.” Sets of property are color coded, and the cost of each property is clearly state on the board. The ownership card for each property displays all possible rents, a mortgage value and the cost of houses and hotels.

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Shannon Appelcline: My (Secret) Life in Gaming

About 14 months ago I wrote an article called My Life in Gaming. It was a simple piece talking about the many different sorts of gaming that I’ve been involved in over the last twenty-five years, from D&D to board games to computer games and back to board games again. Much to my surprise the folks over at the British ‘zine Flagship liked the piece, and reprinted it in issues #120 and #121.

Since I wrote that article, life has continued changing, as it ever does, and I’ve been surprised to see the gaming pendulum shift once more. It’s ultimately one of the reasons that I’m writing here less than I used to. (I’ll get to that shortly, but as you’ll see, it’s more lack of time than lack of interest).

I should say that I still am playing board games. Almost every Wednesday I go over to EndGame for four hours or so of play, and almost every Thursday I have folks over to my house for my “review nights"--though I’ve actually been reviewing less too, and as a result we sometimes play something random on Thursday instead.

However, in balance with that, my interest in roleplaying games has increased quite a bit, to almost the levels it enjoyed when it was my prime gaming entertainment back in the 1990s. The reason has ultimately been my job--which is nice, given that working in the industry was part of what burned me out on RPGs about a decade ago.

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Shannon Appelcline: Anatomy of a Game: The Carcassonne Standalones, Part Two: Rules Changes

Welcome to what just might be my last game design article on Carcassonne. In case you’ve missed them I’ve written five previously. The first four extensively covered the main game and its expansions while the last article instead looked at the standalone variants, and examined how their tile selection and scoring differed.

• Part One: The Original Game
  
• Part Two: Balance and Tiles
  
• Part Three: Cooperation and Competition
  
• Part Four: Complexity & The Rivers
  
• Carcassonne Standalones Part One: Tiles and Scores
  

This week I’ll be continuing my look at the six standalone Carcassonne games and taking a look at how each one offers different answers to some major game design questions. I’ve identified three major elements, each of which differs quite a bit from game to game. Examining them offers some interesting insights both into game design and how the Carcassonne series has changed and evolved.

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