Come back with me to a time when men were real men, women were real women, and big woolly mammoths were real big woolly mammoths.

In those days, the meeples had three jobs available to them:
* They could be fishermen, who staked out a single river to feed their tribe, only returning home once they'd discovered a beginning and end to the river (which could occur at a spring or a lake)
* They could be gatherers, who wandered the forests, picking up the fruits of the trees.
* They could be hunters, who tracked down aurochs, mammoths and antelopes for the tribe, and spent all their time out in the meadows.

The stone-age meeples also erected fishing huts on the river-systems, from where they could gather all the fish available!

Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers is the first variant of the classic German game of Carcassonne. It took the basic ideas presented in Carcassonne - playing terrain tiles, claiming features with your pieces ("meeples"), scoring for completed features - and changed them both to fit a stone-age game, and also make them work better as a game.

Personally, I think Hunters & Gatherers the superior game, but Carcassonne becomes much better game an expansion or two is added.

Game play is similar to Carcassonne. Each player, during their turn, draws a tile at random and then places it next to an existing tile on the board so that the edges match. He or she can then place one of their pieces on the tile, claiming one of the terrain features (river, lake, forest or meadow) as long as no other player has already claimed it. If any features have been completed by that tile, then points are scored and players recover their pieces.

The similarities and differences from the original game are summarised below:

Forests

The "cities" of H&G. Each Forest tile is worth 2 points for a completed forest. In contrast to the original game, an incomplete Forest is worth nothing at game's end.

Some forest tiles contain gold-mines, which give a bonus play to the player who completes the forest they're in. See Bonus Tiles below for more.

Rivers
The "roads" of H&G. The main difference is that they end at lakes that have a varying number of fish in them - from one to four. Scoring for Rivers is thus the length of the river plus the number of fish in the lakes that terminate it. (A spring also terminates the river, but is worth no additional points). Like the forests, an incomplete river scores no points at game end.

Meadows
The "farms" of H&G. As with the original game, meeples placed in meadows are not recovered and stay there until the end of the game. Scoring is quite different, however. Instead, you count up the number of aurochs, mammoths and antelope in the meadows, and score two points for each. More interest is added by the sabretooth tigers, who eat the antelope - for each tiger in a meadow, one antelope is not counted.

This opens up a tactic of placing tigers in opponent's meadows. One other difference to the original game is that meadows tend to be a lot smaller due to the way forests and rivers intersect more often.

In a nice evolution of the rules, the hunter meeples are placed on their sides rather than standing up to remind you that you're not getting them back!

Bonus Tiles

When a larger forests (3+ tiles) is completed, it is almost certain to have a gold-mine in it; this allows the person who completed the tile, who is not necessarily its owner, to take one of the 12 bonus tiles at random and immediately place it. These bonus tiles are generally more powerful than standard pieces, although there are a couple - the infamous "auroch" tiles - that aren't.

Some of these tiles have interesting special effects, for instance the Forest Fire tile scares away all the tigers in the same meadow, and the Shrine tile allows someone to control a meadow regardless of how many meeples they have in it! Other tiles just give extra fish or an extra 2 points for complteed forest.

Meeples and Huts

Unlike the original Carcassonne, you have only five regular meeples (to be used in the forests, rivers and meadows). Two additional pieces, the huts, can only be placed on river systems, either on a river or a lake. At the end of the game, whoever has the most huts in a river system scores points equal to the number of fish in all lakes in that system. There's no direct parallel in the original Carcassonne, and the mechanic can lead to some interesting confrontations.

Tactical changes

With H&G, you really want to complete forests as quickly as possible and gain as many bonus tiles as you can. Meanwhile, there's a real tension in the placement of river tiles, for you don't want to allow your opponents to score points for a river system you've been building up into a great chain of fish-filled lakes.

Conversely, the importance of meadows (compared to farms) is diminished, although you can still get some nice points from a meadow. These changes to the game make the tiles a lot more even in usefulness. Certainly I've seen people groan in Carcassonne when getting yet another road tile, but the corresponding river tile - especially if it has a tiger on it - is a far more interesting prospect.

Conclusion and Impressions
If there's one thing I don't like about Hunters & Gatherers, it's the look of the tiles; they are a bit too garish for my tastes. The quality of the components is otherwise good, and the gameplay is excellent, suitable for children and adults.

Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers is a good family game. It has a competitive edge to it, and two-player games can be quite cutthroat, but mostly I find it a good, fun game. That it doesn't have player elimination as part of its mechanics is a big plus, when compared to some of the games I grew up with.

That I don't play more of this title comes primarily from the fact that I consider it a fairly light game. It takes about 45 minutes to complete, and I believe that the decisions made are generally somewhat obvious to a skilled player. This is not Die Macher!

Luck and skill both have a part, although, based on a few 2-player games on bsw, I can definitely say that an unskilled player can be crushed by one who has played much more of C:H&G! I prefer to play this game with three or four players.

I delight in the various versions of Carcassonne. I believe that Hunters & Gatherers is the best variant of the original game, and one well worth investigating.

Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers components:
* One scoring board
* 72 terrain tiles (including one starting tile)
* 12 bonus tiles
* 6 point scoring tiles (showing 50/100 pts)
* 30 meeples (6 meeples for each of 5 colours)
* 10 huts (2 huts for each of 5 colours)
* 1 Rulebook