Following my recent posts about board games, I decided to give Carcasonne (on my iPad) another try. When I first played it several months back, I didn’t bother reading the instructions and just tried to figure it out as I went along. As to be expected, I failed miserably. There were several things that I just didn’t get, such as the fact that you can get your Followers back when you score a feature (whether it be a road, a city or a cloister), nor did I understand that only one player can “own” a feature at a time (unless you manage to share the points through clever tile placement). Then, I watched the following video:

Now, I find some of the banter to be somewhat annoying in the Tabletop series of videos, but they are very useful to see how an actual game plays out. Watching the video made things click, so I tried the iPad version again. After many, many games I have gotten pretty good at it, and I ended up getting all the available expansions for it as in-app purchases.

I really like scoring a mega-field with a pig and the pig herd! I often come from behind and win that way.

So based on my experience with the iPad version, I took a look at the actual board game. We already have “The Kids of Carcassonne” for the boys, which is a much-simplified version of it, and it’s fun to play with them. The actual adult version, though, is more complicated and I don’t see my youngest playing it just yet, so it would likely be just me and wife playing it most of the time. Also, it turns out that there are a ton of expansions for it, way more than the few available for the iPad. So my question to you, dear readers, is the following: should I bother getting one or several of the expansions along with the base game? Which would be best for 2-player play? There are a few different box sets that come with several expansions, so I could consider getting one of those. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!