Preamble,
I bought Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers soon after it came out. I’d played and enjoyed the original game for a while at the time, and wanted more of the same. I’ve played both games many many times over the years, so here is my review…

Components.
The game comes with 79 land tiles depicting various rivers, lakes (with fish), springs, forest, and meadows (with animals). There are also 12 bonus tiles, 5 scoring tiles, a scoring track, 6 meeples and two huts each in five colours (blue, yellow, green, red and black), and 10 green wooden disks. There is a 6 page rulebook. All of the components are excellent quality. I actually prefer the artwork of the original game, but Hunters and Gatherers still looks good and it evokes the intended theme of the Stone Age well. The rulebook is well illustrated and written clearly.

Gameplay.
The starting tile, which contains a volcano, is placed face up in the middle of the table. The remaining tiles are shuffled and placed into face down stacks (or one large pile). The bonus tiles are also shuffled and placed face down into a stack. The scoring track is placed nearby and then each player chooses a colour and takes the corresponding meeples and huts. Each player places one meeple on the zero space of the score track.

The starting player is chosen (supposedly the youngest person) and play begins. On a player’s turn, he/she must take a land tile and place it edge-to-edge next to a previously placed land tile to that the terrain matches up properly. He/she may then place one meeple or hut onto the tile just placed. If placing the tile completes a forest or river, it is scored immediately. When placing a meeple or hut, a player must decide which terrain on the tile to place it in (forest, river, meadow for meeple; river or lake for hut). Meeples can not be placed on terrain already containing another meeple (though separate terrain containing more than one meeple can become joined up due to later tile placement).

Rivers are completed when either springs or lakes are placed at each end. Completed rivers score immediately. A meeple (fisherman) on a river that is completed scores 1 point per river segment (tile) plus one for each fish in any lakes at the end of the river. Scores are recorded on the scoring track. If a player completes an entire lap of the scoring track, he/she takes a ’50’ point tile as a reminder of the points accrued. If a second lap is completed, he/she turns this tile over to the ‘100’ point side.

Forests are completed when they become surrounded by meadows. A player with the only meeple (gatherer) therein scores 2 points for each forest segment (tile). If that forest contains a gold nugget symbol, the player immediately draws a tile from the bonus stack and places it following the normal rules.

Sometimes tiles are joined up so that rivers or forests end up with more than one meeple on them. If such terrain is completed, each player involved scores the full points unless one player has more meeples than the other(s) in which case he/she alone scores the points.

Each player has two huts that can be placed on a river or lake. Huts can only be placed if there is not already a hut on the river system.

The game ends when the last tile is played, at which point the huts and meadows are scored. Huts score 1 point for each fish in the entire river system. Meadows are trickier to score. They represent all of the connected ‘interstitial’ space between forests and rivers, and they contain various animal symbols. It is quite easy for separate sections containing different meeples to become connected during play. If a player has the only meeple (hunter) in a meadow, that player scores 2 points for each deer, mammoth or aurochs in the meadow but for each sabre-tooth tiger, they lose the points for one deer. The green wooden disks are provided to cover pairs of tigers and deer to help scoring (though we have never needed to use them). If several players tie for hunters in a meadow, each scores the full points total. If one player has more hunters, they alone score the points.

Bonus tiles can impact on scoring thus:

- The fire tile chases all tigers from a meadow, allowing a player to score all the deer therein.
- The mushrooms tile adds two points to a completed forest
- The sacred shrine tile means that the player placing a hunter on it is the only the player to score points for animals in that meadow, regardless of how many hunters other players have there.
- The aurochs adds 2 points to the scoring of a hunter.

The player with the most points at the end is the winner.

So, What do I think?
I like this version of Carcassonne. I think it is a good game straight from the box, and doesn’t need any expansions. It is just a little bit more complex than the basic Carcassonne and for me that makes it more fun to play when the two are compared. Adding the expansion to standard Carcassonne puts them on a par. I don’t like the artwork of Hunters and Gatherers as much as the original, but it still looks good and it fits the theme well. Overall I rate this game a 7 out of 10 and my comments on it echo those in my review of the original Carcassonne. It is a good game, and I’m usually willing to play but over the years my rating has slipped from a 10 to a 7 because there are now quite a lot of games of similar length and/or weight that I’d rather play. Like the original game, Hunters and Gatherers has been relegated to being played only occasionally. It is good for introducing newcomers and children to the hobby. Children seem to find the meadows easier to understand and score than the farmers in the original game, and for that reason as a family we tend to play Hunters and Gatherers a little more often.