How soon is too soon

[Chooselife]

So after an afternoon doing and undoing tuck-boxes as a family activity I did promise my almost 4yr old that I would play "grown-up" Carcassonne with her.
She plays Junior Carcassonne often but since she doesn't pay attention to closing the roads with her color kids I really fought it would be a pain to teach her how to close features.
It was a surprise to see her using tiles like ffcc to close cities and frrr to close three roads without any of those "What about here" hints.
I didn't introduce farm scoring as that is sometime difficult to introduce to adults but in the end I was quite surprised that she manage to play a Base Game plus River II without much fuss or getting fed up before every tile was drawn.

So my review on playing Carcassonne with 4yr old's:
PROS:
Nice family option and still better than watching Frozen for the 100+ time
Good way to have them counting
Good way to improve their hand dexterity
EXPECT (not really CONS):
Every meeple on the board after 7 tiles played.
Nagging that they don't have meeples anymore which is perfect for the "Now you have to close things" teaching.
Closing your features just because they like you.
Forgetting most of the meeples moved on the first turned and keeping the focus on the most recently played ones.
"When can we play again?" & "When can we play with those (rest of the collection)?" ensues.





Final thoughts:
River is a great way to teach Carcassonne basics to everyone.
It's is perfectly possible to enjoy a Carcassonne game with 4yrs old.

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2489.0

[jungleboy]

Nice experiment, merit for you! I'm glad it went well overall and I'm sure that by the time I move to Portugal at the end of this year she will already be a demon at trapping meeples and will always be the first player to get her barn down. 

[danisthirty]

Great post, thanks Chooselife!

A lot of it rang true with me for the games I've tried to play with my 5y/o daughter. We have only played proper Carcassonne a couple of times though as she's very good at Kid of Carcassonne and usually makes great decisions to improve her own position without giving away any good opportunities to me. I'd like to say I taught her well, but the toughest part of it was encouraging her to not help me out with her tiles! The rest of it came entirely naturally, and now that she's got the hang of "not being nice" she's a force to be reckoned with!

PROS:
Nice family option and still better than watching Frozen for the 100+ time

You've gotten off lightly. We must have watched it at least 18,000 times before I "lost" the disk...

EXPECT (not really CONS):
Closing your features just because they like you.

As long as they don't expect their kindness to be reciprocated eh?

[Chooselife]

EXPECT (not really CONS):
Closing your features just because they like you.

As long as they don't expect their kindness to be reciprocated eh?

Ohh she shouldn't.... I still won but truth be told just for 10 points 

[dirk2112]

My son is 7 and he plays very well for his age.  He usually beats his mother and he never runs out of meeple.  The 2 areas he really needs to improve upon are farms and the barn.  He doesn't like farms because they tie up his meeple.  He never plays farms until there is only a small stack (a dozen or so) of tiles left.  There have been a few games where he has a 20 point lead going into the end only to see farms add 30 or more points our scrores. 

The one thing he is really good at is trapping other people's meeples.  The other night he used his Abbey early in the game to limit one of my farmers and prevent me from potentially having a great place to put a barn.  I always use the Abbey to complete my features, I never thought to use it to trap anything.