Boardom is the regular blog feature in which Mary geeks out on table top games.
boardgamegeek.com
Carcassonne was one of my own “gateway” games that got me into Euro board games and it remains one of my favorites. It’s an easy-to-learn tile laying game named after a medieval French town. You lay down one randomly drawn terrain tile each turn. You may place it wherever you like, as long as it’s adjacent to an existing tile and all the sides match up so that roads connect to roads, fields to fields, cities to cities, etc. Then you may place one of your seven followers, little wooden people affectionately known as “meeples,” on one of the tiles to claim a city, road, field, or cloister. On to the next turn. It’s really pretty simple. When the element you claimed gets completed, you can remove your meeple and gets points based on what the element was and the number of tiles it took up. If it never gets completed, your meeple stays on it until the tiles run out and you get your points then, but you may not get as many. A lot of the game is dictated by luck from the random tiles. But strategy is still very important. You may choose to conserve your meeples for bigger claims down the road, or you may wickedly try to take over another player’s claim.
Play Time: 40-60 minutes
Number of Players: 2-5. I haven’t played it with more than two very often, so I can’t say what the ideal number is. But BoardGameGeek users voted 2 as the best.
Suggested age: 8 and up.
Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Published: 2000, Rio Grande Games (English version) and Hans im Glück (German version)
Buy: This game is widely available. It looks like you should be able to get it in the $15-20 range online. Or you can skip the shipping charges but pay a little more and support your Friendly Neighborhood Game Store. 
There is also an awesome iPhone version out now. You can play it online or locally with a friend who has it, and includes a great solitaire game, with which you can challenge your friends to beat your high score. There is at least one big game-changer I noticed about this version though: it gives you the ability to see how many of each kind of tile are still left in the virtual tile bag. When I played with John I felt this gave both of us a new advantage we never had before. Sure, you could conceivably figure out how many of each tile are left in the original game, but it would take a lot of keeping track and counting. I’m not sure if I like this new feature, but either way, I very much recommend BOTH the original and the iPhone versions. There’s even an Xbox 360 arcade one if you’re interested!
Don’t forget Carcassonne: Hunter’s and Gatherers! A bunch of my coworkers got totally hooked on that game. My boyfriend even wants to buy two sets so we can play mega Carcassonne.
Also : There’s nothing like geeking out by naming your Undead Warlock after this game.
Carcassone is a great game
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I used to play it with my friends (but I recently moved so my friends are 800km away
It has some expansions, some major and some minor. The first two or three major expansions are well done but then the hype cought on an the authors made more expansions and most of them are “too much” imho.
Smore: Oh man, I haven’t tried Hunters and Gatherers! So that one is good? I’ll have to try it at GenCon in August.
Ramana: Yeah we have all the expansions I think, but I agree they get to be a bit much. I can’t remember the one we usually play with… If you and your friends have Xboxes or iPhones, you could look into getting the versions for those platforms, and then you could play online with them. Too bad there’s not just an all around PC version.
Ditto on Carcassone being a great game. Adding the expansion for Builders and Traders really expands the multiplayer aspect, as you get the addition of what my group affectionately calls “Bob the Builder”. Placing your builder on an already meepled city or road, allows you to draw an additional tile the next time you add to that zone. I use tiles (tiles only, we don’t usually add the gameplay from the tower or princess expansions) from most, if not all of the expansions, and I regularly play with 5 people, and the games get very large with all the tiles from the expansions. Having Bob allows for a slightly faster game with so many players.
I live very near Carcassone O_o.I never knew there was a BOARD GAME with this name…It’s not even in French
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I love this game. I am a cartographer and it is like making a new map every game