MISTS OVER CARCASSONNE
Not a mist-step at all
Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede | Publisher: Hans im Glück
Carcassonne is a staple of the hobby, an entry point, a way in for many gamers. It’s got the frisson of conflict, being a bit sneaky by working your way into a larger castle having done almost none of the work, and the gentle points-bedamned creation of a weird map. Kids love it, drunk people love it, and most people between. It has a ton of expansions – too many to use all at once we’d say, as we’ve tried it. When you get into the third hour of the expansion-based bloat of your own making (no one said you needed to use towers and dragons, that’s on you) you might ask – what if there was something simpler? A refined Carcassonne that doesn’t feel like it’s missing something, now that we’ve become accustomed to the tweaks of the expansions?
The answer might just be Mists Over Carcassonne. A fully standalone game that asks players to work together, rather than jostle for castleextensions. A thick mist creeps over the fields of Carcassonne – the spirits of the Cathars are risen as ghosts in retribution for being hunted during the crusades. Apparently anyway, I hadn’t checked this surprisingly metal backstory featured on the back of the box until sitting down to write the review. Regardless, the mist is coming to consume all, and with it comes some extremely cute ghost meeples.
Each turn players are going to be drawing a tile and placing it as you would in any game of Carcassonne, but some of these tiles contain the aforementioned mist. Whenever a mist tile is placed, you add the number of ghosts printed on it to the tile (minus one if you’re adding it to mist that is already in play). If you can’t add the number of ghosts you need to the tile you’ve just placed it’s over for you – and everyone else around the table.
Don’t worry though, you are medieval ghostbusters after all – even down to your very meeples, which now carry a ‘torch’. Mist works just like creating a classic castle – complete it, and everything inside is returned to the supply. If you capture all the ghosts, they return to whence they came (probably just to pop up again in a moment). The other way to remove ghosts is to score points – each time you complete a road or a castle you can choose to take the points or remove a couple of spooks. Laying tiles is much the same – although you can place mist tiles in a way that doesn’t ‘work’ (i.e. into the side of a castle, or sharply against a field), although the downside is it’s more difficult to remove any ghosts to place to a tile like this. Because you’re now working together you can discuss your tile placements and strings of moves you want to take together. This can lead to a little bit of a ‘alpha gamer’ problem – where one player takes over for everyone, although that’s often a problem in cooperative games anyway.
Importantly the scoring is the same, which mean If you share a castle between two players, you both get the points. Working together on larger structures is the way to win big points, and to our group felt like original unspoken aims of the game – that initial draw into Carcassonne at all is this childish urge to make a really big castle.
The balance of the game then comes from doing your best collaborative building, and not getting overwhelmed by bringing too many ghosts on to the board. It’s surprisingly difficult past the first level. There’s six of these in total, each adding a new twist on the basic formula. These include a kind of tile-timer, where you have to make a certain number of points before the first pile runs out, and adding castles and graveyards. Castles are a point scoring opportunity, and graveyards force you to bury one of your meeples there when four sides of the tile are closed off. This meeple is taken from elsewhere on the board, making it quite a dangerous move to fill in these tile spaces around a cemetery. Hounds will help you later in the game, where they can remove ghosts from tiles adjacent to a meeple on the board. Later the effects of cemeteries will change further adding even more devious ghost-generating rules for players to work around.
So it’s a difficult cooperative tilelaying game, but is it Carcassonne? The answer is mostly ‘sort of’ – without the competitive elements the very nature of the game is changed, and the motives for all of your actions are tweaked. It’s in no way bad, and it’s exactly what cooperative Carcassonne should feel like, but there’s definitely some of the friction missing. Instead of the delicious anticipation of playing your slightly evil moves, you’ll be chatting about the group’s plans for the game. This sometimes leads to working out that you’ve lost it in three turns time, which can be a let down.
But this is a little unfair. It’s not just cooperative Carcassonne, it is its own game entirely. We often like to recommend smaller, contained games a bit like the classic – and this is just like one of those. A little like Streets, Mists Over Carcassonne brings a compact version of the classic to a table. And if you like the game a lot, but would like to play with more confrontation-adverse players, Mists is the ideal place for that. You still have the puzzle of building out the board with your tiles, but the collaboration is one of mitigating the swarm of ghosts. It’s quite an anxiety driven game, where drawing the wrong tile can mean the end of everything – or rather, you’ll have to play something that’s damage limiting rather than a winning move.
Mists Over Carcassonne is a great addition to those who love the base game, and a great way to introduce different kinds of players into the Carcassonne. Gather a few friends to bust a few ghosts together.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT
WE SAY
A great reworking of the classic formula that, we hope, expands in the same way a normal game of Carcassonne sprawls. A great starting place for those who really don’t like the conflict that comes from the main game.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗60 Tiles (including ghosts)
◗45 Meeples
◗ Starting tile
◗ Score board
◗ Hound and victory tokens
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED CARCASSONNE
This might be a little bit obvious, but if you like the original game – and would maybe like to try a new twist on the classic, without the sprawl, then Mists Over Carcassonne is a wonderful place to start.