• Carcassonne - Safari

Hans im Glück

Carcassonne - Safari Edition

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Carcassonne: Safari is a standalone tile-laying game for 2–5 players, aged 7+, that plays in about 35–45 minutes. With light, family-friendly rules built on tile placement, set collection and area influence, players explore the African plains and win by spotting the widest variety of animals.

Players
2–5 players
Play time
Up to 1 hr
Age
All ages
Complexity
Easy
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About the Game

Carcassonne: Safari trades medieval France for the African plains, sending players on a tile-laying trek in search of wildlife. Each turn you place a tile to extend the savannah, then decide where to send your rangers: walking trails, climbing a baobab for a bird's-eye view, or digging watering holes where animals gather. As in classic Carcassonne, meeples score when their features are completed, but variety is key — whoever spots the widest range of animals earns the most points. For 2–5 players aged 7 and up, it plays in about 35–45 minutes with light rules featuring tile placement, set collection and area influence.

The original Carcassonne, designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede and published by Hans im Glück in 2000, won the Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis in 2001 and has spawned many expansions and spin-offs. Safari is a standalone spin-off released in 2018, keeping the familiar draw-and-place system while swapping cities and roads for bush, savannah and shared watering holes.

History

The original Carcassonne, designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede and published by Hans im Glück in 2000, won the Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis in 2001 and has spawned many expansions and spin-offs. Carcassonne: Safari is a standalone spin-off released by Hans im Glück in 2018, keeping the familiar draw-and-place tile system while swapping medieval cities and roads for bush, savannah, baobab trees and shared watering holes.

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Watch: How to play

Rules of Carcassonne - Safari Edition

  • Set up: place the start tile in the centre, shuffle the remaining tiles into face-down stacks, sort the animal tokens by species, and give each player the rangers of one colour.
  • Turn flow: choose a start player; on your turn draw one tile and add it to the savannah so every touching edge matches legally.
  • Place a ranger: after placing the tile, you may put one ranger on that tile on a trail, a baobab or a watering-hole feature, if that feature is open to claim.
  • Completed features: when a trail or watering-hole feature is completed, the winning claim collects the animal tokens shown by that feature and those rangers return.
  • Longer plays: baobab rangers are a bird's-eye-view play that can pay off later, so avoid stranding every ranger where it cannot return.
  • Objective: collect animal tokens; final scoring rewards both how many tokens you have and how many different species you collected, so range lifts the value of the whole set.
  • Game end: when no tiles remain to draw and place, resolve the remaining end-game spotting, total the animal collections, and the highest score wins.

Strategy

  • Prioritise a missing species over another duplicate early; one new species can improve every token you already hold.
  • Favour short trails and nearly finished watering holes that return rangers quickly and turn placements into tokens.
  • Before contesting a feature, compare the likely animal payout with the number of turns your ranger may be stuck there.
  • Use baobabs as a long play and contest shared watering holes only when the expected return justifies committing a ranger.
  • Watch which species opponents are collecting, then place tiles that make their easy completions harder or force awkward connections.
  • Extend your own features while giving opponents edges that are simple to join now but costly to finish later.
  • If a feature is unlikely to complete before the tiles run out, stop feeding it unless the end-game spotting still justifies the ranger.