Who’s the King of the Castle?

When a new baby enters your life, it’s easy to be so busy building your relationship with him or her that your relationship with your partner takes a back seat. To ensure that we still make time for each other, Charlie and I decided some time back to set aside one evening each week for “game night”. We play card games or board games or computer games – whatever takes our fancy that week. It’s just a couple of hours that we set aside where we’re not talking about Little Man or passively sitting there watching TV.

One of our favourite board games is Carcassonne. It’s not really a board game as such – it’s actually a tile-laying game. We love it and we’re totally hooked. But Carcassonne is designed for 2-5 players, and while you can play it with two people, it’s not ideal. We’ve played it before with three or four people and found it more enjoyable than it is with two.

But then we discovered that there is a version of Carcassonne called “The Castle” that has been especially designed for two players. We’ve been playing it a lot recently and I must admit, we’ve been getting a little competitive! Of course!

Unlike standard Carcassonne, “The Castle” is designed so that it has a pre-defined play area, the confines of a castle. To score you must complete a feature in which you’ve placed your follower. The competitive element comes into play when your opponent also has a follower – or followers! – in the same feature. Whoever has the highest number of followers in a feature when it is completed is the only one who scores for that feature. Now, this same rule applies in regular Carcassonne, but for some reason in “The Castle” it’s not always obvious until the last minute that your opponent is about to lay claim to a road or a house or a tower that you’ve been carefully building for several turns. It makes for some very entertaining games. We certainly enjoy them, so much so that week after week the first game both of us suggest lately is “The Castle”!