Matthew BaileyI’ve been on the fence about whether to review Star Wars Carcassonne for a while, largely because it’s out of print, pretty difficult to get hold of, and you’re going to be paying an inflated price on eBay.
We are really lucky in that one of my local board game pubs has a copy, and as Toby is Star Wars obsessed at the moment, we’ve actually played it quite a few times now. I finally thought, sod it, let’s do a review of it. But please read this with the understanding that you’re going to be spending about £50 minimum if you actually want to own this.
Star Wars Carcassonne plays similarly to regular Carcassonne, but with a few really key differences. Firstly, roads are replaced with trading routes, cities with asteroid fields, and monasteries with planets.
I’m going to work on the basis that you understand regular Carcassonne, and all of that bit plays very much how you would expect. The real differences are what make this unique compared to any other version of Carcassonne, and that’s the inclusion of battles.
Battles occur in situations like in regular Carcassonne, where two of your meeples share something. Rather than evenly splitting everything, as you do in regular Carcassonne, you battle to see who wins. Each player gets one die for a small meeple, two dice for a large meeple, and one die if the contested realm has one of their faction’s symbols on it. Maximum of three dice each. Each player involved in the battle rolls their dice. The dice with the highest value for each player will be considered. The player who rolled the highest number wins. In case of a tie, each tied player gets one point and then rolls again. The losing player(s) withdraw their meeple(s) and receive one point for each die they used.
It’s a fun, cool system which adds a really unique flavour to what otherwise would have been a straight reskin of Carcassonne, and actually, I really like it. It’s really cool, works really well, and adds a nice bit of strategy. When playing normal Carcassonne, it can be very easy to basically leave each other alone, but this game encourages you to play aggressively, trying to take other people’s trade routes and asteroid fields in order to gain more points. If you like a more aggressive playstyle, then this is actually a genuinely good version of Carcassonne to play. Plus, the aesthetic and the theme are really cool.
Now, if this was a normal game you could go to the shops and get, I’d say it’s a really good version of Carcassonne with an interesting mechanic that encourages more aggressive play, which you don’t really get anywhere else. Plus, the Star Wars theme is obviously going to be popular with lots of kids. Unfortunately, this isn’t normally available. It was released in 2015 and is not the easiest thing to get hold of.
Having said that, I was pleasantly surprised when I started putting this review together that pre-owned copies seem to have come down to around the £60 mark, and there are definitely deals to be had. When I checked about a year ago, they were around the £100 mark, so they’ve definitely come down in price, which has thrown a bit of a spanner into the works in terms of my decision as to whether or not to ever buy a copy.
This really is going to come down to your perceived value, and whether you’re happy spending about £50 on a second-hand version of Carcassonne. It’ll be a cool version with an interesting, potentially popular theme. If, however, your kids aren’t at all bothered by Star Wars and don’t like the sound of a more aggressive gameplay style, then I’d probably just recommend giving regular Carcassonne a go.
