A clever tile-laying game. The southern French city of Carcassonne is famous for it's unique Roman and medieval fortifications. The players develop the area around Carcassonne and deploy their followers on the roads, in the cities, in the cloisters and in the fields. The skill of the players to develop the area will determine who is victorious. Carcassonne is considered one of the "gateway" games that opens the world of boardgames to many new players and spawns many sequels and imitators. Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride are frequently cited as the others in the Euro genre.

The big news in 2008 is another major change in format. The triple digit fields of the past were compiled from four heats of multi-player games. The change in 2007 to a continuous format, single elimination, two-player event cut the field in half. One might well wonder why mess with a format which has consistently yielded among the largest fields at WBC?

Originally, the plan was to hold this event in conjunction with the Carcassonne World Championship qualifier that Rio Grande is planning. The winner was to get an XBOX 360 and play other champions via XBOX live with the final winner getting a trip to Essen as the USA representative to the World Championship. The World Qualifier is run as a single elim, two-player game so we are adopting that format to remain in position as an official qualifying site for the World championship. Alas, problems co-ordinating all of this with Microsoft have let it in doubt at presstime, so we cannot state whethert his will happen or not, but we will nonetheless keep the format in place in case it does. It is also nice to have another major Euro event which can be played to conclusion in one day on the final weekend of WBC. It makes up to some degree for all the events which have been missed by weekend visitors.

This year we've amended the format to a hybrid of multi-player games in the first round advancing 16 winners to single elimination two-player games.