Covert 
You will spend most of this game finishing other people's cities by accident.
A fan-made browser build of Carcassonne: 72 tiles dealt into two draw piles, followers on roads, cities and monasteries, plus optional river, abbot and farmer rules, and bots to fill the empty seats. A fan project, unaffiliated with Hans im Glück.
The game
A tile-laying strategy game of clever placement.
Carcassonne is a tile-laying game set in medieval France. Players take turns drawing a tile and fitting it against what's already down, and the map of roads, cities, fields and monasteries that grows out of it belongs to everybody at once. A tile is legal only if every edge it touches matches.
After placing a tile you can claim what it is part of, a road, a city or a monastery, by dropping one of your followers (meeples) on it. Closed features pay immediately and hand the follower back; anything still open when the deck runs out pays at a reduced rate. You get seven followers, and they only come home when a feature closes, so a follower parked on an ambitious city can be out of the game for twenty turns.
- Draw Take the top tile off either pile and find a legal spot for it: road meets road, city meets city, field meets field, on every edge that touches.
- Place Optionally put a follower on the new tile to claim its road, city or monastery. You can't drop one into something a rival already holds, but features merge when a tile joins two of them, and that is how cities end up contested.
- Score A road or city pays the moment it closes; a monastery pays once all eight neighbouring tiles are down. Whatever is still open when the deck empties is counted at the end, for less.
When the last tile is placed, every unfinished feature still holding a follower is counted at the reduced rate and the highest total wins. Usually it's the cities that closed a turn before the deck ran out that decide it.
Expansions
Three optional rule sets, switched on in the lobby.
None of them is on unless the host turns it on, and they all work at any player count.
- The River
- Ten extra tiles and a starting tile of its own. The river has to be laid out completely before the base deck opens, so the opening turns trace a waterway that the rest of the map then grows around.
- The Abbot
- One extra follower each, on top of the usual seven, and the only one that can claim a garden as well as a monastery. On your turn you may lift the abbot back off the board instead of placing a follower, scoring it there and then. That's how you rescue one from a monastery that is never going to be finished.
- Farmers
- A follower can also be laid out in a field, and once it is there it stays put until the game ends. Fields pay nothing while you play; at the end each one is worth 3 points for every completed city it touches. Roads, cities and the river all cut the grass into separate fields, so two meadows that look like one usually aren't, and a farmer you put down early can quietly outscore everything else you built.
More expansions are in the works, and they'll appear here as they land.
Rules
Find the full rulebook online.
Two rulesheets below, both official: the third-edition sheet from Hans im Glück in English, and the Ukrainian edition put out by the local distributor. Neither one settles the arguments a four-page sheet has to compress, and the one that comes up most often at this table is what happens when a new tile merges two cities that already have owners.
Inquiries
FAQ
What is Carcassonne?
A German design from 2000 that became the standard first step into modern board games: 72 landscape tiles, drawn one at a time and fitted edge to edge until the pile is gone. Two to five players build a single shared map and score by claiming pieces of it with wooden followers. There are no cards and no dice, and every decision comes down to where a tile goes and whether to spend a follower on it.
Do I need an account or a download?
No, and nothing to install. One practical note: the map keeps spreading outward as tiles go down, so a phone works but a tablet or laptop is more comfortable once a game runs long. Your colour stays yours; reopen the room link from the same browser and you're back in the same seat.
How many players do I need?
Two is enough, five is the ceiling, and bots take the seats you can't fill. Playing solo against four bots is a legal table, and colours are dealt at random when the game starts.
What's in the deck?
The 72-tile base set: 71 landscape tiles plus the fixed starting tile. One local quirk: instead of one shuffled stack, the deck comes as two face-down piles and you pick which to draw from, which changes the odds not at all but does give you something to blame. The two optional rule sets are listed in their own section above.
How does scoring work?
Roads pay 1 point per tile and cities 2 per tile, or 4 for a tile carrying a shield; both the moment the feature closes. A monastery counts the tiles around it plus itself, so 9 once it's boxed in. When the deck runs out, whatever is still open is counted at half rate, so a city you never finished drops to 1 per tile. And if a feature ends up shared after two halves merge, the player with the most followers on it takes the points, with ties paid in full to everyone level at the top.
Is this the official Carcassonne?
No. It follows the third-edition rules, and the 2024 English rulesheet linked above is the one it was built from. It has no connection to the official Carcassonne apps. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Hans im Glück.
Is it free?
Yes, and all three extras are included: the river, the abbot and the farmers are lobby switches, not paid content. Nobody gets billed for anything here, but if the game has earned you a good evening, the author will gladly accept a coffee. The link for that is in the page footer.
How do the bots decide where to play?
They weigh each legal tile placement by the same scoring the game itself uses to close a road or a city, so they'll usually finish their own feature before handing a rival the last tile of a city or road. Followers and fields work the same way: grab a sure thing on the spot, otherwise it's a judgement call based on how many followers are still free. Once the tile pile starts running low they get a lot less picky, since a follower still sitting in hand at the end scores nothing.