Carcassonne
There is one game for iOS that I consistently play more than any other. It’s Carcassonne. I check it several times through out the week if I’ve missed one of my turn notifications. And I typically start up a bunch of new games with friends every weekend.
Carcassonne is based on a very popular German tabletop game that won the Spiel des Jahres and the Deutscher Spiele Preis awards in 2001. Actually, saying it is based on it isn’t quite right. It’s a faithful reproduction of the tabletop game. This is by far the best version of Carcassonne I’ve seen (way better than the Xbox 360 version) and I cannot imagine a better translation with current technology. The object of the game is to build fortifications and roads within the French town of Carcassonne. You construct them by laying out tiles that are drawn in turns from a stack. You can collect points when these structures are completed provided that you’ve placed one of your meeple figurines on at least one of the tiles they’re made of. Competing players can try to steal structures from you by playing their own meeple on a close-by tile they’ve played. The player with the most meeple gets the points. Despite the element of luck in drawing the tiles, the game is very strategic in when and where you place both tiles and meeple. You can even place meeple in fields and collect points at the end of the game for all of the completed forts that adjoin each field. I like to think of the meeple as tax collectors that collect taxes (points, really) on fortifications and roads as they’re completed or at the end of the game based on real estate. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins, and there can often be big upsets in the final standings based on points collected from fields.
The execution of the game is top notch as I said before. The art is beautiful and is very faithful to the actual board game pieces. Carcassonne is well laid out on both the iPhone and the iPad. But, I much prefer playing on the iPad because there is much more room to see the table and you can rotate the iPad to portrait or landscape orientation depending on the shape the town is taking during play. It supports Game Center so that you can play against your friends and random players, get achievements, and view leaderboards.
