Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers review

So after reading some reviews of Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers, I went down to the friendly local game store to order it. After playing a few times with my 7-year old daughter, I thought I'd post a review from a new gamer chick perspective. Overall, I think it gets a A- for playing with her so far.

Construction and Graphic Design
The pieces are of very sturdy cardboard construction, and the art is very clean. When punching out the map tiles, we ended up slightly tearing a couple edges, so that would be my only complaint. The player pieces are painted pieces of wood.

Basic Play
The game plays very fast once you explain the rules. The object of the game is to gain the most points fishing, gathering, and hunting the region you map out as you place the map tiles. On your turn, you take a random map tile and then connect it to other tiles already in play. You have to worry about connecting rivers to rivers, meadows to meadows, and forests to forests.

As you place your tiles, you can put down one of your tribesmen for fishing, gathering, or hunting. When a river is completed, you gain points for the map tiles that make up the river as well as for the fish in any lakes involved. You get a lot more points for completing forests. At the end of the game, you gain points for hunters in continuous meadow pieces that have mastadons and aurochs while having fewer tigers.

Strategy
The strategy is both simple and complex. You can score on just about every turn if you want to take the strategy of scoring 3 or 4 points on each turn. Or, you can try to build up large forests to score 10 or more points after spending a few turns making the forest bigger.

Complexity for Kids
I had to help Sophia every once in a while in making strategic plays, but she very easily understood where she could put down a map tile. While I was at work the day after we played our first game, she apparently read up on the rules and corrected me on a few things! So the rules can't be too difficult. If you have younger children that are able to count or at least match up the map tiles, it would be easy to simplify the rules to involve them as well.

Overall
As a whole, it was a fun game and is perfect when you've got a half hour. It works great as a two-player game, but there are pieces for up to five players. Sophia has jumped at every opportunity to play this game, so I think it's a hit in our household. It's very affordable at the $20 to $25 range.

I give it an A- with the minus only being the tiny issues we had with punching out the map tiles.