Pyramid Review
Travel Carcassonne
Published by Rio Grande Games
Designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Full-color boxed set, 72 tiles, 40 pawns in five colors, instructions, cardboard insert, cloth bag, rules; $29.95
Designer Klaus-Jürgen Wrede has gotten a lot of mileage out of his creation, Carcassonne, and the game itself is about to put on some serious miles. Travel Carcassonne allows fans to take it with them everywhere and anywhere. Supposedly.
The object of the game remains the same: Score the most points by the time the last tile is played.
Players take turns drawing tiles from the stack and placing them on the table, intent on forming the long roads, broad townships, and expansive fields that make up the city. Onto these, they place their pawns, hoping their knight or thief or farmer takes control of its appointed feature and scores the most points.
Now the whole thing appears in miniature . . . well, maybe not quite the whole thing. This set has similar content to the original game, but some of it serves a dual purpose. The product description states unequivocally that this game doesn't fit with its normal-sized brethren, so you can't combine anything from the two versions.
The components are still the same high quality found in the average output from Rio Grande Games. The tiles are smaller but no less sturdy; picking them up isn't noticeably more problematic here (assuming one ever developed the surety needed to lift the game's tiles without fracturing the entire town), but then they . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: January 25, 2008
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