The Voting Game vs Carcassonne

Players are constantly socializing with each other, be it by laughing along at the questions and results or explaining their choices. This leads to many stories being told throughout the whole game, which can also lead to inside jokes and throwbacks in the next questions, making the game a memorable and fun experience for everyone involved.

The Voting Game is highly replayable because of the large amount of possible house rules and four official expansions.

There are some rules mentioned in the official instructions that can help change up the game, for example, by allowing players to vote for themselves or transforming the game into a drinking game. You’re also free to add your own house rules, change the win condition or just play for fun.

The Voting Game has four unique expansion packs – NSFW, Fill In The Blank, Political, and Create Your Own Expansion. Each of these brings new thematic questions to the table that adds to the replay value and fun. For example, the Create Your Own Expansion lets the players themselves create some unique questions before the game begins, whereas the Fill In The Blank expansion adds question cards with blank spaces that are filled in when it’s your turn.

If you’re playing the game just for fun without a win condition, then players can join or leave as they please without impacting the game too much. It is very easy to deal in another player to a game already in progress once a question is finished. Similarly, if someone has to go, then the game can continue without interruption simply by removing the player’s number from the other player’s hands.

The Voting Game is great for a larger party with a lot of people because it’s made for a maximum of 10 players. This means that usually nobody will be left out of the fun.

The game is very straightforward and easy, making it possible to teach it to anyone in a few sentences. Each player is assigned a number and given a deck of number cards with the same amount of cards as players in the game. Every turn a new question is revealed, for example, “Who would find a way to break out of prison and succeed?” The players then vote for the player who, in their opinion, fits the description. The player that received the most votes gets a point. If it’s a tie, then the reader decides the winner. The first player to get 10 points wins the game.

The rules are pretty basic for Carcassonne, with first time players being able to grasp its concepts quite quickly, making Carcassonne a great gateway game.

Every turn the player draws one tile from the pile. They then must place the tile adjacent to a tile that has already been placed in a way that the edges match. There are four types of terrain on the tiles – roads, cities, monasteries, and grassland. After the tile is placed the player can choose to put a player figure, a.k.a. a meeple, on the tile to potentially score points.

If a meeple is placed on a road, then the player will score one point for every road tile until the road ends in an intersection or a city. If the meeple is placed on a city, the player will receive two points for every city tile until the city is fully walled off. If the player chooses to place the meeple in a monastery, then they will receive one point per tile until the monastery is fully surrounded by tiles. Lastly, if the meeple is placed on grassland, then it’ll only score points at the very end of the game, giving three points for every city in the field. The player with the most points wins.

Carcassonne will pretty much never feel dull, there are so many possibilities and variables in the game not only because of the randomness, but also because of the simplicity and the variation count.

Carcassonne is going to be a different game every time because of the tiles you and your opponents draw and where you choose to place them. There are over 70 tiles in the base set, which amounts to a lot of possible combinations.

Carcassonne has been around for a while, and this has led to the release of many expansions throughout the years. Each of these provides more tiles, rules, and other variables to the game.

Lastly, you can even introduce many variations that’ll change up the game without owning any expansions, for example, instead of drawing one tile and placing it every turn, have the players manage a hand of four tiles.

The board game pieces are highly detailed and colorful, be it lush grassland, a fortified medieval castle, or a monastery in the middle of nowhere. The game is themed after southern France in the medieval ages and the actual fortified city of Carcassonne and the landscape around it. There is definitely some forethought put into the polish of this game that makes much of it intuitive and a pleasure to look at.

On a more practical note, the back of the tile with which the game starts is in a separate color, so it is easier to find when starting the game.

The game is very accessible to beginners, but it allows for quite a bit of strategic play when you get more familiar with the concept. You can either go for long-term strategies with farms, or for quick point-grabs; you can build your own cities in peace or try to mess with your opponent whenever possible. A lot of tactics come in the form of cutthroat play – trapping other players’ meeples, stealing cities, and getting to share points.

Moreover, the last turns of the game can also influence the outcome a lot – players receive some points for unfinished creations as well.

In a regular expansion-less game of Carcassonne it can take 30 – 45 minutes to blast through the approximately 70 tiles.

Because of the simple rules Carcassonne is very easy to get back into even after big breaks and it’s great to teach to other people. This means that the people you play with can change without any problems and you can play the game with anyone – children, your parents, your friends, or your partner.

The gameplay is dynamic, and everyone’s constantly engaged, managing their meeples and calculating which part of the board is worth fighting over. Even the kids stay engaged since the winner is usually not obvious untile the very end.