50 free Carcassonne trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Carcassonne is the tile-laying game that quietly rewired modern board gaming. Klaus-Jürgen Wrede dreamed it up on holiday, Hans im Glück published it in 2000, and a year later it took both the Spiel des Jahres and the Deutscher Spiele Preis. Its little wooden followers even gave the hobby a word: meeple. These 50 questions cover the base game first: the 72 tiles, the eight followers, thieves on roads and monks in cloisters, how fields score, and the older scoring editions that still confuse mixed tables. Then the expansions: Inns and Cathedrals, Traders and Builders, the dragon and the fairy, the Tower, the Catapult, Hills and Sheep, the Phantom and the Minis. There are spin-offs from Hunters and Gatherers to Star Wars and Mists over Carcassonne, the Xbox 360 port, the World Championship at SPIEL in Essen, and a few questions about the real fortified town in southern France that lent its name. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a game-night tiebreaker.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who designed Carcassonne?
Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
He came up with the game while on holiday and still teaches music and religious education near Cologne.
Q 02Which German publisher first released Carcassonne in 2000?
Hans im Glück
Rio Grande Games handled the English edition until 2012, when Z-Man Games took over.
Q 03In what year was Carcassonne first published?
2000
A redesigned edition with new tile and box artwork followed in 2014.
Q 04Which two major German awards did Carcassonne win in 2001?
Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis
Winning both in the same year is rare; the game is now regarded as one of the hobby's foundational titles.
Q 05The game takes its name from a fortified town in which country?
France
The real town's medieval citadel, the Cité, sits in the Aude department of Occitania.
Q 06How many players does the base game support?
Two to five
Inns and Cathedrals adds a sixth set of followers, grey in 2002 and pink in the 2015 edition.
Q 07How many terrain tiles does the original game contain, including the start tile?
72
The River mini-expansion adds 12 more, and is bundled with the edition currently in print.
Q 08How many followers does each player receive?
Eight
One sits on the score track, so only seven can ever be on the board at once.
Q 09A follower placed on a road takes what role?
Thief
Knights hold cities, monks sit in cloisters and farmers lie down in fields.
Q 10A follower placed on a field is laid down instead of standing — why?
Fields score only at game end
Fields are never completed during play; their value depends on the finished cities they touch.
Q 11A cloister is complete when surrounded by how many tiles?
Eight
Completing one scores nine points: one for the cloister and one for each neighbour.
Q 12At the end of the game, a field's score depends on what?
Completed cities it touches
A field enclosed by roads that touches no finished city scores nothing at all.
Q 13Under first-edition rules, a farmer's field scored how many points per adjacent city?
Four
Second-edition rules cut that to three per city; the third edition aligned fields with other features.
Third-edition scoring rules entered the German version in what year?
Q 21Which was the first full expansion, originally called simply "The Expansion"?
Inns and Cathedrals
It added a large follower that counts as two, plus 50/100 tiles for scoring.
Q 22Which expansion introduced the pig and the builder followers?
Traders and Builders
The builder grants an extra turn whenever its feature is extended or completed.
Q 23Which expansion added a beast that eats followers and a fairy that protects them?
The Princess and the Dragon
Its magic portal tiles let you place a follower on an earlier, unfinished feature.
2004
English releases kept shipping first-edition scoring until 2008.
Q 15Tiles connect across which part of their border?
Adjacent edges only
Roads must meet roads, fields meet fields and cities meet cities along the shared edge.
Q 16Which starting river tile begins the River expansion?
The source
The final river tile is the lake; both have a single river edge.
Q 17How many river tiles does the River mini-expansion contain?
12
They replace the single standard start tile and share its dark back.
Q 18The River expansion was originally distributed how?
Free at trade fairs
It became part of the base game in August 2012 and stayed in the 2014 redesign.
Q 19In the tile-naming code, what does the letter M stand for?
Meadow
The standard start tile is CRMR, read clockwise from the top edge.
Q 20How many distinct tile types are there among the 71 non-river tiles?
24
Mathematicians at Valparaiso University counted them, five being pennant variants of other tiles.
Q 24The Tower expansion lets players build towers to do what?
Capture nearby followers
The box also includes a cardboard tile tower used for storage and drawing.
Q 25Which expansion includes tiles that can fill holes in the board and complete features?
Abbey and Mayor
It also introduced wagons that score a feature and then move to a nearby one.
Q 26Which expansion includes a physical launching device?
The Catapult
Twelve fairground tiles trigger a round of flinging tokens across the board.
Q 27Hills and Sheep added which animal tokens alongside the sheep?
Wolves
Each player gets a shepherd follower; the expansion also brought vineyard tiles.
Q 28Under the Big Top includes what wooden figure?
A circus tent
Its 20 tiles carry Big Tops or acrobat towers, and each colour gets a ringmaster.
Q 29The Phantom mini-expansion was the first to be released without what?
Tiles
Its see-through acrylic phantoms let a player place a second follower in a turn.
Q 30The Festival expansion came bundled with which release?
The 10th anniversary edition
Its ten tiles represent one year each since the game's 2000 release.