Carcassonne for iPhone is Great

We tend to ignore iPhone games for whatever reason. At the same time, I’ve played more games on the iPhone recently than on my PSP that gathers dust in the corner. Recently, one of the best games for the iPhone has been released. Though you might have purchased Carcassonne on another system, you owe it to yourself to get the iPhone version.

For those who have never played the game, Carcassonne is best described as a multiplayer competitive puzzle. Players take turn placing tiles and building castles, roads, and fields. Originally a fantastic tabletop game, the iPhone brings the game the one thing that I really wish it had on Xbox Live. Namely, turn-based play.

Take a turn, send it to your friend, and you’re done until they take their turn. At the dawn of the Internet, there were a number of mainstream games with “email gameplay” that allowed you to take turns on long strategy games. While that playstyle has mainly disappeared for no apparent reason, Carcassonne brings it back with style. My last game took a week, with turns occurring randomly whenever I felt like it, sometimes at 2am.

If you love strategy games and can get your friend to buy it too, Carcassonne is well worth forking over $5 to the iPhone App Store. That price is supposedly promotional for a short time, but I think it would be a mistake if they raised it.