Mists Over Carcassonne is a cooperative spin on the classic
Can you save the French countryside from a ghost infestation?
Hello! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve published, but here I am, happy to talk about Mists Over Carcassonne, a cooperative spin on the tile-laying classic.
Before we get there, I’ve played some great games in the last week that I’ll touch on briefly. There are so many more games I’d love to talk about, but you’ll just have to wait.
I finally got QE to the table, and what a game it is! An auction game without a scale or limit for bids, with the player bidding the most losing outright? Incredible. [AllPlay]
We’ve played a few games of Fiction, which is basically Wordle but with somebody lying to you. I like the spin. [AllPlay]
Trick-taking and climbing/shedding games continue to take a lot of my attention. One I’ve particularly enjoyed lately: Five Three Five is easy to teach, smart and well-produced. [Portland Game Collective]
Mists Over Carcassonne, a cooperative permutation of the long-lived tile-laying classic, was set to be released in the United States in late 2022. That date got pushed, and it got pushed, and it got pushed, and here we are: It’s now slated for an August 31 release date. I suppose that’s not far away, and given my wife is slated to give birth well before then, I suspect August 31 will appear on my radar very, very quickly. But you know what? Waiting just wasn’t in the cards for me, especially when I knew it was widely available in Europe.
Consider this an advance review, I guess, and maybe a tip if you’re looking to pick up the game yourself. See, it’s not too hard to order a game from Germany and have it shipped to the U.S., it turns out. Everyone’s favorite mega-retailer offers pretty reasonable shipping to the United States, and for just a little bit over the US retail cost, I now have Nebel Über Carcassonne sitting on my shelf. (Well, it’s in a bag, because we played it with friends last night. You get the idea, though.)
“That’s great, Matt. Thanks for telling us about it,” I’m sure you’re saying. I suppose there’s one or two more things I have to say, actually, so let’s just jump right into it.
For a start, Mists Over Carcassonne is cooperative. That’s the primary shift, but it’s an important one. Carcassonne is a game that pits players against each other, and it can be fairly aggressive. Somebody’s got a nice city going? It would be a shame if somebody placed a road such that it would be difficult to complete, if not impossible. A real shame. That aggressive instinct is a powerful one in Carcassonne, and you actually don’t want to shake it entirely if you want to be good at Mists. Having an intuitive sense of what makes certain tile placement more difficult than others will drive you and your team toward success, and it feels really good to put those skills to use in a cooperative setting.
Once you turn this game from competitive to cooperative, you then need to set out a goal — something that will test players as they work together. That’s where this game’s slightly hilarious theme comes in: Your Carcassonne map is haunted by ghosts. And not just any ghosts — these are very neat looking ghost meeples, and if you ever can’t place one when you need to, you lose immediately. You won’t have to place ghosts on every tile, just most of the land tiles. If the tile shows mist, it’ll also show a ghost. You don’t have to connect mist-to-mist in the classic Carcassonne style, but you’ll still want to, as finishing a mist feature leads to all ghosts in that section of mist being removed. (Think of mist tiles as inverted cities — you want your cities to get as big as possible in Carcassonne, and your mist to be as contained as possible. That’s how everyone else plays cities, too, right?)
The game provides a bit of a ramp in difficulty over six different levels, with the first requiring you to score 75 points as a team. Each time you finish a feature, you score as you would in Carcassonne, moving a joint scoring token along the track. Everyone’s points grow cooperatively. It’s nice! There’s one major caveat, and it’s one that really spoke to me: If you manage to complete a feature with multiple players’ tokens present — knowing, of course, that you still can’t place in a feature where another player has tokens, but you can certainly combine discrete features into one — you’ll score points for every player present. Completing a ten-tile city with three players present, then, would score you at least 60 points.
The second level of difficulty adds two new types of tiles: castles and cemeteries. Castles score points when they’re completely surrounded, earning two points for each tile surrounding it with a mist feature. Cemeteries don’t score any points, instead providing a challenge: Every time you’re required to place a ghost, you have to also place a ghost in an open cemetery. It’s just one ghost every time, so multiple cemeteries won’t tank you immediately — but it will also prove a little tricky. To close a cemetery, you’ll place tiles on every side (above, below, left and right — no diagonals here.) When you close it, you’ll also leave one of your meeples there permanently, burying it and giving you fewer meeples with which to operate moving forward.
Mists Over Carcassonne is exactly what I wanted in a cooperative version of Carcassonne. It adds just enough to feel fresh, but it also retains a lot of the classic mechanics, giving me plenty of previous knowledge with which to operate. It does feel like a bit of a puzzle without being aggressively so, and I’m happy to add this to my collection.
Of course, you can also reportedly play this as an expansion for the base game, but it doesn’t make the whole thing cooperative — it just becomes another competitive expansion. I haven’t tried that, but maybe I will someday. (There are so many expansion options already, though. So, so many.)
A final thought here: I think this may be the first Carcassonne game to canonically use the term “meeples” in the rules. Am I wrong? I’ll probably fact check myself before next newsletter, but I’d love to hear from you if I am. That’s such an interesting development, given the term came around during a play session shortly after the original was released.
Thanks, as always, for reading! There’s a chance I’ll be taking a bit of a hiatus depending on the birth of our (first!) child, whose arrival is fast approaching — although I might also write a couple newsletters before then that I can send out later. We’ll see! If anyone has advice for new fathers, I’d love whatever you’ve got.
Amazing. I want to try this out!