Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers

Get ready for a journey through time with Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers, a standalone version of the classic Carcassonne that takes you straight to the Stone Age! Here, the dynamic of building the map remains the same, but with a super cool prehistoric twist. Instead of medieval cities and roads, you'll be creating landscapes with dense forests, winding rivers, fish-filled lakes, and vast meadows. Your goal? To be the player with the most points at the end of the game, of course!

Each turn, you draw and place a terrain tile, expanding the wild world before you. After positioning the tile, you can decide to place one of your meeples to represent a hunter in the meadows, a gatherer in the forests, or a fisherman on the rivers. But the novelty doesn't stop there: you also have fishing huts that can be strategically placed on rivers or lakes to ensure a good harvest of fish at the end of the game, scoring for the entire connected river system.

This Carcassonne retains the essence of the mechanics we love but introduces fresh rules that add a special flavor. For example, completing a forest with gold nuggets gives you an immediate bonus: you get to draw and play one of the twelve special Menhir tiles. Meadows score for each wild animal present (beware of tigers, they can negate other animals!), and rivers are worth points for the tiles that compose them and the fish in connected lakes. The 2020 edition brought even more improvements, such as more Menhir tiles, detailed scoring for deer, aurochs, and mammoths in meadows, and more comprehensive scoring for rivers and fishing huts, which now also consider fish in river segments. And to top it off, each player receives three fishing huts instead of two, opening up more strategic possibilities. It's the Carcassonne you know and love, but with a wild makeover and full of new decisions!