Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a tile-based board game for two to five players designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede. It received the Spiel des Jahres award in 2001. The game is named after the medieval fortified town of Carcassonne in southern France, famed for its city walls. The game board is a medieval landscape built by the players as the game unfolds. The game starts with a single terrain tile face up and 71 others shuffled face down for the players to draw from. On each turn a player draws a new terrain tile and places it adjacent to tiles that are already face up. The new tile must be placed in a way that extends features on the tiles it abuts: roads must connect to roads, fields to fields, and city walls to city walls.

After placing the new tile, the placing player may opt to station a meeple on that tile. The follower can only be placed on the just-placed tile, and must be placed in a specific feature. A follower claims ownership of one terrain feature—road, field, city, or cloister—and may not be placed on a feature already claimed by another player's follower. However, it is possible for terrain features to become shared after the further placement of tiles. For example, two field tiles which each have a follower can become connected into a single field by another terrain tile.

The game ends when the last tile has been placed. At that time all features (including fields) score points for the players with the most followers in them. The player with the most points wins the game.