It's Carcassonne, nothing more, nothing less. While not as much fun as the actual table-top version it is a very comprehensive version with many of the expansions.

The inclusion of a good manual for beginners (covering all the expansions) would have been a welcome addition.

Parts of the game still has German in it making it hard to understand many of the options. The official website is in German only.

No tutorial. No popup information what things are or what rules mean.

Good game, but not very new player friendly at all. The lack of translations also makes you feel they don't care about the English market.

This game stay true to the feel of the boardgame Carcassonne.

The learning curve can be a little difficult.

The Ai in the custom games, are very good, sometimes it feels like youre playing against a person.

A solid buy if you like this type of game.

The graphics and interface are pretty basic but the gameplay is excellent. At first I had problems with the game crashing while launching and locking up my Windows 7 PC. I managed to fix this by removing all the graphics options in the options menu on the main screen. I'm not sure which graphics option(s) cause the crashing for me, but since I didn't notice any difference when I deselected them all that was good enough for me.

A great reproduction on the boardgame. The only problem I had was, the game did not save my profile... but remedied by giving the game Admin permissions (Win7) and that allowed the game to save your player profiles properly.

The game UI looks like from previous century, I see better UI created by high school students. Not much help, fortunately I know the desk game well, so I don't need any. The game is not bad, but I expected more. Maybe my expectation was set too high though.

I didn't play the board game, so I'm a newcomer to the game. I must say that the videogame includes a pdf manual and it's just several pages to read in order to know the simple mechanics of the game (easy to play, hard to master, as it should be), so that is totally solving the lack of a tutorial that some people argue.

All in all, the game is enjoyable, mostly when playing it hotseat with some colleagues.

As a con, I would mention that it crashes for me (Windows 7 64 bits) some times that I try to start a game or take some action, but if I run the game again and select to ignore the error, the game recovers what I was doing before, so it's not that serious after all.

A competent implementation of the popular boardgame, with some of the add-ons available and selectable prior to starting each game. Graphics are good - the tiles look like the boardgame.

The interface is a little clunky at first but quickly becomes fluid. It helps that the game shows you all of the possible places a tile can be played, so it's just up to you to pick the best one.

The AI is extremely sharp, always placing tiles in the perfect place, and it takes a lot of effort to beat the AI players. If anything, I find the AI to be frustratingly aggressive, going above and beyond the need to interfere with my building. It doesn't really try to raid or steal, as much as place tiles to make it difficult or impossible for you to finish the town or road you were working on. I suppose that's how it's meant to be played......

This would work extremely well as a "hot-seat" game for multiple human players. It's also handy if you left the Carcassonne box box at home but have your laptop with you on the train, for example.

Carcassonne is not user friendly. This game heavily requires player knowledge of how the game plays and what each expansion adds. There is some help, but most of it redirects to online help. The controls and icon locations also take awhile to get used to, and are not laid out in a way that naturally seems to make sense. For instance, right clicking does not cancel an action.

If you like Carcassonne you will be able to get some enjoyment out of this game, but if you are a new player you will need a lot of patience and self teaching to understand and enjoy the game.

Carcaasonne is a simple but difficult strategy board game to master. You basically have some simple, straight forward concepts that are complicated by the moves of a fairly aggressive AI, or players. The most challenging aspect of the game is counting the farms, and even though the game tallies those for you, sometimes I am a little confused by the -negative totals... although what i think it is is doing is adding the points and when you don't "win" the farm area, it takes them away again instead of giving you zero.

Some things to note. We've had off again on again issues with connecting to the server. For the first few weeks, I wasn't able to do so at all. Then, I was able to sign on but then someone else wasn't able to. We've had simliar experiences with Direct IP, and trying to figure out ports. A lot of the support for this game is not in English, but you can find some assitance online.

The server, at times, doesn't seem very busy but the games do not remain listed as they are being played. At anytime of time, I find people coming and going form the online community, although, again, not many speak English or speak a little. This is not a problem! Once they realize you do not speak German, I believe, you can still be invited to a game. You don't need a lot of cross talk to enjoy this game.

Some other things to not about this game. There is no AI available for online matches. There is for hot seat and, of course, single player. There are multiple editions to play in, and you have to be careful about placing your piece. Don't worry, it won't let you make an illegal move but there doesn't appear to be a way for you to pick up the piece again or rotate it, after it's placed, if you made a mistake.

I love the music, although it's a short track, and you can have your music play instead.

This plays just like the actual board game, which I own, except it tracks points for you, Nice!, and has a fairly stripped down but functional UI.

I had heard a lot of good things about this game, but I had not played it myself. I picked it up, thinking there would be some sort of tutorial or a help section to tell you how to get started. Nope. You're thrown right in. The help in the game consists of "This is the game screen" and "This is replay." That's about it. No obvious information about what the tiles do, how scoring goes, or how to change the orientation of the tiles while you're playing. You can customize the rules to different editions, but if you don't know what the editions are, that doesn't help either. There are a lot of websites that give you strategy for the game, but some in-game help would be nice.

The game itself seems to play well. At higher levels, I get beaten down soundly, which is what you would expect. You can customize the AI to put more weight on various ways of scoring (cities, roads, farms, etc...)

A feature that is sorely needed (at least, for a newbie like me) is an "Undo" button, in case you put the tile in the wrong place or orientation. A "Place your tile here" suggestion would also be nice. There is a replay game, so you can watch previous games that you have saved.

If you know how to play the game already, this is probably a wonderful pickup. If you're interested in learning, you can pick it up, but don't expect much help from the game to learn how to play.

The game itself is excellent, but it has some bugs, which are fairly minor. One benefit this game has over the 360 version is that you get the expansions 1-3, which is something you don't get on the 360. The bugs are a graphical glitch that occurs on one of my laptops (guessing it's video card related, the laptop that has issues is NVIDIA, the other is AMD), and you have to enter a serial for MP, though no serial is given. Just entering anything for a serial seems to work.

Another issue is that the game doesn't have any sort of tutorial, and the AI is quite vicious, so there's a harsh learning curve.

I'd say the game is worth $10, though a better deal if it goes on sale eventually.

Warning do not install to the default location, if you do you will not able to save any games or your profile to Disk. Install in a location outside of Program files.

Now on to a review of the game itself this not only has the base game and river tiles it has the first 3 expansions rules can be fully customized to suit your style of play. AI is brutal on higher setting. No tutorials ingame. It expects you to be familar with the rules of the boardgame. Apparently made around 2001-2002 and discountinued in 2006 hard to tell homepage is in Dutch Manual for GG version is in English and the game can be switched to a number of different languages so no problem there. Excellent Version of the Boardgame would be a 5/5 except for installer flaw.

A faithful (if somewhat uninspired) adaptaion of the boardgame including the additional content from the very first expansion sets. The AI is surprisingly challenging and plays extremely destructively. The game does have some minor compatibility issues with modern systems, though.

Buy if you're short on human opponents and love the board game, otherwise I'd say you can give this one a pass.