Carcassonne: Star Wars Review

What’s your favourite scene from the Star Wars movies? It’s a tough choice! Mine is probably the climactic showdown at the end of Jedi where, with the fate of the Galaxy at stake, Luke faces up against Darth Vadar again. They roll their dice, clattering across the steel clad floor of the Death Star, end over end, time slowing down as they finally come to a halt… wait, I think I’m getting confused with Jumanji…

 

 

The title Carcassonne: Star Wars triggers two thoughts when read: 1) “Ooo, I like Carcassonne!” and 2) “Ooo, I like Star Wars”, and then an immediate follow up: “WTF!?” Can Carcassonne, a game that offers a rich thematic experience… about as often as a monkey with a typewriter completes another Shakespearean masterpiece, really capture that ephemeral essence that makes Star Wars so beloved of so many?

Carcassonne was, and still is, a game of laying tiles to construct a landscape while placing meeples on the various terrain elements to control and eventually (once that region is completed) score points. Carcassonne: Star Wars holds true to that but no longer confined to medieval France we are now offered the wonders of the galaxy to construct! Wonders such as: trade routes (space roads!), asteroid fields (space cities!), and planets (space abbeys!), all surrounded by space (NOT space fields, obviously, I mean how can you have a field in space?). With the exception of bonus points if there’s a faction symbol present, they all score the same as they do in normal Carcassonne.

Let me just highlight that lack of fields for a second, because it’s really quite important. You see, what we learnt from the original game was that farming is complicated, even if it mostly just involves lying down in a field (that’s a Carcassonne joke, don’t worry). It was the part that causes most difficulty when teaching the game. By removing them entirely, the Star Wars edition is dramatically simplified and much more accessible, admittedly at the cost of some strategic depth. But don’t worry, it’s not Jar Jar Binks simple, that core puzzle of building up the galaxy to suit your vision is still there, trying to steal cities and roads off each other is still there. And speaking of stealing…

 

 

That’s right! It’s war! No more Mr. Nice Carcassonne, passively sharing the points when meeples manage to manoeuvre themselves on to another player’s area, now those meeples fight for the feature! Each player grabs a die, maybe 2 dice if it’s their big meeple involved, and an extra dice if that region has one of their faction symbols in it, then they roll off and whoever gets the highest value on a single dice wins, kicking out the other players meeple.

This is without doubt the most controversial new mechanism, adding a massive dollop of luck onto what used to be a game of almost pure decision-making. For me though, this dice rolling combat is just great fun! It gives the game the thrills and excitement demanded of a Star Wars product, it gives it dramatic tension when a big important combat goes down and, even if you’re not involved, you’ll almost certainly be cheering for one side or the other. Surviving an enemy assault feels amazing, losing just feels bad. Maybe this sounds awful to you but, remember, this is a 30 minute game, once you’re out of the mind set of thinkey traditional Carcassonne and ready to throw caution to the wind, you can have a great time. Go, on. Let your hair down.

 

 

A couple of mechanics present in the game also help mitigate this luck. Firstly, the loser of a combat gets a point for every dice s/he rolled. Secondly, and most importantly, planets. Planets will be the absolute focus of the fighting in this game (as you’d hope in a galactic civil war). There is still stealing roads and cities – I mean trade routes and asteroid fields – but I’d almost say it’s rarer than in the original game. The awesome thing about planets is that anyone who places a tile adjacent to a planet can drop ship troops down to attack it! This makes them hotly contested, and rightly so for they are worth a lot of points. But the benefit of this rule is that, since it’s so easy to launch an attack, even if you lose every combat it is quite possible for you to score more points than the player who eventually scores the completed planet!

This is huge! You are free to throw meeples into the guns of your enemies because, hey, points for trying right? But then maybe you could do better by investing those tiles in other parts of the board? Planetary combat offers an all-new type of decision into the game. I was initially worried that this balancing would only really work in the 2-player game, and that with more there wouldn’t be the same opportunity to catch up. But you know what, in a recent 4 player game I watched one player at the table lose dice roll after dice roll after dice roll, just the most ridiculous bad luck, but he still managed to place a strong second, and I’m not convinced it was purely the dice rolls that held him back. Oh yeah, this player? This was his first game of Carcassonne.

 

 

So does playing Carcassonne: Star Wars make you feel like a hero (or villain) of the Star Wars universe? No. I mean, the first thing you do when you open this game is to quite literally paste Star Wars stickers on to the meeples. They look pretty awful to be honest, but at least the board is drop dead gorgeous (for Carcassonne anyway).

There are moments of awesome, like when you notice the Alderaan tile merges into an asteroid field, or when an imperial player launches an assault on rebel held Hoth, but likewise these fun references are easily missed. Yes you each get to be a character from the Star Wars universe (again, seriously, where the hell is Leia? Yoda got a piggyback and died of old age in the original trilogy, he has no place launching ground assaults!) it is purely aesthetic. However, what this game does do, and I feel this is more important, is to capture the spirit of Star Wars, the sense of fun and excitement, the terror of Darth Vader slamming his big meeple down on your tenuously held planet. And that’s before we get to the utterly brilliant team game, in which two rebel players and two imperial players have a head to head battle with a shared score. Oh man do I love the team game! Having someone to share the highs and lows is utterly fantastic. Then you really do want to overthrow the evil Empire, or crush the upstart Rebellion.

 

 

In 1977 Star Wars revolutionised Science Fiction movies, taking a genre made up of deep thinking films and showing audiences that Sci-fi could be fun, could be exciting, and at the same time opened sci-fi up to a whole new audience. So too has Star Wars Carcassonne showed us how we can let rip and have silly, exciting, fun without losing the core puzzle that embodies Carcassonne. You might loathe the idea of dice in your pure, strategic, Carcassonne and that’s fine. You’ve still got normal Carcassonne! But if you, like those kids of 1977, are ready for a lighter experience, played for the thrills, then you might have a great time with Carcassonne: Star Wars! I know I have.

 

Rating: Come to the Dice Side

 

Our copy of Carcassonne: Star Wars was kindly provided for review by Esdevium Games. It has an RRP of £19.99 and is available from your local hobby store!