Mists over Carcassonne

The original Carcassonne is now something of a board game classic, having made it’s way onto the high street and sold over 12 million copies. It’s had numerous expansions and iterations from castles to catapults, but Mists over Carcassonne is slightly different: for the first time, players can play co-operatively, and win or lose together.

The basic mechanic of the game is the same: on your turn, you add a tile to a growing map on the table, following some placement rules: roads, cities and grass must match when placed adjacently. The only land type that ignores this rule is the mist, which can be placed adjacent to anything. But you probably want to place mist next to mist too, for reasons that will become clear…

When you’ve placed your tile – after discussion between all players as to the best location, though the final decision is yours – you can optionally add a worker to it, either on a road, in a city, or in a castle. These workers will score points for the players, but only when the structure they occupy is finished: a road has two distinct ends, a city is surrounded by walls, a castle is surrounded by tiles. When this happens, the worker will come back to you and you can either score the points, or remove ghosts from the tiles instead.

Ghosts inhabit the mists: whenever a tile with mist on is added, you place more ghosts on it, although if you add mist to existing mist, you get to place one less ghost, and if you manage to complete the mist – in the same manner you would finish a city; there are no exposed sides – then all the ghosts in the mist are removed. That’s good, because collectively your goal is to score a certain number of points (how many depends on what level difficulty you’re playing) but if a tile demands you place ghosts and you have none left in the supply, you lose! This can happen rather quickly, if you’re not shrewd in your ghost management.

There are a couple of additional wrinkles. A good one is that on the higher difficulty levels, hounds will come out and help you score points at critical junctures in the game. But a bad one is that mixed into the tiles are several cemetery locations: whenever one or more cemetery is active, adding a ghost to the board means adding an extra ghost to a cemetery! Fortunately you can negate the cemetery by hemming them in: once each side of the tile has another tile next to it, the cemetery ceases to function as this madcap ghost production machine. If you reach the points total demanded by the game: you win!