CARCASSONNE: STAR WARS (2015)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
2-5	30 mins	Klaus-Jürgen Wrede	Hans im Glück

Now, it’s a known fact that everything that exists in the known and unknown universe has a Star Wars version made of it. Sometimes this is good, other times it is bad.

Changing roads and cities for trade routes and asteroid fields doesn’t feel like the obvious choice for the Carcassonne brand, but here it finds a comfortable middle ground of not being rubbish, while offering a little twist on proceedings.

The basics are all there, from placing tiles with your meeple claiming something, to completing a route and getting those points.

But this version chucks dice into the mix and lets players battle it out for the various planets from the Star Wars universe.

Any time you place a tile in the eight spaces around a planet (see Abbey), you can instead move your new meeple to invade.

Your battle strength is represented by how many meeples and the size of them (each player has one large meeple, a little like VITICULTURE). You max out at three strength after the combination of meeples and matching faction symbols.

Then you roll, and the highest number wins. SImple.

Perhaps too simple for some. There really isn’t much to the tactics except the placement of your meeples. You can plan to be strong on a planet, but at the end of the day, lady luck decides if you continue to rule over Tatooine.

Yet while simple, it does add an extra dynamic to games where people have their fun playing nasty. Here, your planet isn’t safe until it’s completely surrounded, so the safety of your territory becomes a priority.

It’s enough to be different from the original version of CARCASSONNE, and it plays to the theme it employs with the Star Wars licence stuck on.

If you like both parts of this, then it probably has a home in your collection. If you don’t like cutthroat CARCASSONNE, then probably best to avoid.