Carcassonne is a tile placement game in which the players draw and place a tile with a piece of southern French landscape represented on it. The tile might feature a city, a road, a cloister, grassland or some combination thereof, and it must be placed adjacent to tiles that have already been played, in such a way that cities are connected to cities, roads to roads, et cetera.

Having placed a tile, the player can then decide to place one of their meeples in one of the areas on it: in the city as a knight, on the road as a robber, in the cloister as a monk, or in the field as a farmer. When that area is complete that meeple scores points for its owner.