Carcassonne Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Carcassonne is a tile-laying game about finishing what you start. Players build a landscape of roads, walled cities, cloisters and open fields, dropping little wooden followers onto features they hope to complete. Scoring is what makes the pencil work awkward: points do not arrive once a turn but whenever something is finished, and a large slab of the total lands in one go at the very end.

Setup

Place the starting tile face up. Each player takes seven followers in their colour and puts one on the scoring track — or, if you are keeping score here instead, simply starts on zero. Shuffle the remaining tiles face down.

How to play

On your turn, draw a tile and place it so its edges match everything it touches. You may then put one follower from your supply onto the tile you just laid, as a thief on a road, a knight in a city, a monk on a cloister or a farmer in a field. You may not place a follower into a feature somebody already occupies. When a feature is completed, its followers score and return to their owners.

Scoring

During the game, when a feature is completed:

• Road — 1 point for each tile the road runs across.
• City — 2 points per tile, plus 2 for each pennant inside it.
• Cloister — 9 points, being the cloister tile plus all eight neighbours.

At the end of the game, for everything still unfinished:

• Road — 1 point per tile, the same rate as before.
• City — 1 point per tile and 1 per pennant, half the completed rate.
• Cloister — 1 point per tile present, so the cloister itself plus however many of the eight surrounding spaces are filled. A cloister with five neighbours scores 6.
• Field — 3 points for every completed city that the field touches. Cities left unfinished are worth nothing to a farmer.

In every case the points go to the player with the most followers in that feature. If two players are level there, each of them scores the full amount rather than splitting it. Followers left in unfinished features are not penalised.

If you are playing with Inns and Cathedrals, note the two scoring changes: a completed road with an inn scores 2 per tile but an unfinished one scores nothing, and a completed city with a cathedral scores 3 per tile but an unfinished one scores nothing.

Ending the game

The game ends when the last tile has been placed and scored. Work through the end-game pass in a fixed order — roads, then cities, then cloisters, then fields — so nothing is missed. The highest total wins; a tie is shared.

Common variations

Dropping farmers entirely is the most common house change. The original edition paid four per city instead of three. Groups short on time also cap the game at an agreed tile count.