Carcassonne: Catapult
Rio Grande Games has published numerous expansions to the family-friendly strategy board game Carcassonne, but in the latest set the company takes the tile laying game in a new direction. Carcassonne: Catapult adds land tiles, a few other tokens, and an actual catapult-like mechanism to fling said tokens around the game board. Yes, Catapult sends tokens flying through the air for game effects when they land. By adding this dexterity challenge, the Catapult expansion makes the game less predictable and more confrontational, providing a “hate” mechanic for players to invoke upon each other – if their aim is right.
Players who want a physical challenge and more luck than the drawing of tiles provides might enjoy incorporating this set into their Carcassonne games. At the same time, making use of this expansion can make strategic placements on the board seem transient, and possibly less important than how to prepare backup plans against the catapult shots of other players. As such, Carcassonne: Catapult can make games seem fun and less serious, or terribly frustrating and silly, depending on the group that’s playing.
To get a proper idea of how the Catapult expansion works, you may need a quick refresher on Carcassonne itself. In a nutshell, the idea of the game is to build the landscape of the board – adding to its cities, farms, roads, and cloisters – by placing randomly drawn land tiles. Players each have seven Follower tokens (often called “Meeples”), which are placed on evolving board features to claim them in the hope of scoring points from them when the features are completed. Once a road, city, or cloister is completed, the player who claimed it scores its point value, and takes back the corresponding Meeple, which can then be used to claim other features. Farmers (Meeples that are claiming farms) remain in place until the end of the game, when they are finally scored. Any feature that doesn’t get completed won’t score any points, and locks up the use of the Meeple that was errantly placed there, so players must think carefully before claiming any feature, especially a farm. An important rule to note is that a board feature can only be claimed by one player, so the only way to “claim jump” and prevent an opponent from scoring is to claim a separate feature of the same type and then connect the two in subsequent turns.
The catapult comes into play when one of the expansion’s new land tiles comes up, which each show the colorful tent of a fair on them. The player that drew the fair tile places it as normal, and then a catapult round begins. In each of these catapult rounds, every player gets a chance to shoot the 10” wooden springboard-like catapult, and none of the shot types get depleted after being fired, so the only advantage to pulling a fair tile is getting to choose the type of shot to be fired that round. This is the expansion’s main strategic element, as there are four types of shots, each with a different game effect.
The first two types of catapult shots affect the existing Meeples on the board. The “Knock out” shot removes every Meeple it hits – even those belonging to the player who fired the shot – and returns them to their respective owners. A single “Knock out” shot can careen back and forth, wiping out several Meeples and freeing partially or nearly complete features for potential claim jumping. The “Seduction” shot is aptly named, as its effect is more insidious. Instead of merely hitting Meeples to remove them, the “Seduction” token allows the shooter to replace the closest Meeple of an opponent with a Meeple of his own (the one being replaced goes back to that player). As if that weren’t enough, the shooter can use one of his unoccupied Meeples to make the swap, or one of his Meeples already in play. Suddenly, we have the potential for not just multiple claims made by a player in one turn, but the legal repositioning of poorly placed Meeples!
The other two shot types grant bonus points, and not always to the player shooting the catapult. “Target hurling” challenges every player to make a shot at the fair tile that was just placed to trigger the catapult round. The player whose shot lands closest to the fair tile instantly gains 5 points – an official Meeple-themed measuring board is included to sort out disputes. “Catch”, the final shot type, challenges each player to be a “hurler” and a “catcher”, meaning one player aims a shot toward the player to his left, who tries to catch it. The catcher gets 5 points if he catches the shot token or if the shot doesn’t reach the midpoint between the two players (as marked by placement of the measuring board); the hurler gets 5 points if the shot goes far enough but isn’t caught, or is touched but not caught, regardless of the distance shot.
Everyone fires the same type of tile in each catapult round, so revenge can be swift indeed – as can the jeering when threats of vengeance are followed by a horrible misfire. Of the four shot types, “Catch” seems the most unbalanced, putting 5 points up for grabs per player. This is counterbalanced slightly by the fact that each player is the hurler once and the catcher once, making 10 points the most any one player can gain. Still, games will certainly be affected by injecting as much as 25 points into the game each time a “Catch” round occurs. Some players may also object to an opponent winning the game through a series of great catches – but those players wouldn’t be using Catapult anyway.
This is a fast and loose game expansion, designed to add fun and chaos to Carcassonne sessions. If this were a serious strategic set, there would be specific guidelines on how to shoot the catapult, or how close is too close to place the catapult, or at least a bit more than the illustration that was casually placed on one side of the half-page rule leaflet. The expansion is still entirely playable, and is fully compatible with the other sets in the game, but shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Like the Chaos Orb card from the early days of Magic: The Gathering, Carcassonne: Catapult will be an enjoyable diversion to some players, and an annoying interruption to others.