Carcassonne. Two n's, two s's. Pronounced Kar-ka-sawn. It's a fortified city in the south of France that was invaded numerous times during the medieval period, and it's also a popular German board-game that has been subsequently turned into an Xbox Live Arcade title. Much like Catan before it and Alhambra to follow, Carcassonne is incredibly popular in Europe, though largely unheard of here, where our board-game pedigree is more in line with Monopoly Australian Edition. So if this was the first time you'd ever heard of it, well, you aren't alone there, but given the addictive nature and simplicity of the game, you won't regret discovering Carcassonne at all!

Carcassone is a tile-based board game that sees players building up cities and infrastructure in the virgin French countryside. There's 72 tiles in the deck, and players take turns laying one down that has been randomly selected from the available pool. These tiles come in a variety of flavours – there's city pieces, roads and monasteries – and each has a number of variations, such as lone monasteries or monasteries connected to a road, for example, as well has half a dozen different types of both road tiles and castle tiles.

Where it starts to get tricky is that once a tile has been placed, the only pieces that can be laid adjacent to it are ones that can logically connect to the tile; so a road can only be joined by another road tile or a road tile with a monastery or city piece on it, for example, and only so long as that road can actually connect properly to make a path. The same is true of the cities, and both need to be "completed” to score the full amount of points – a road needs a beginning and an end, and a city must be completely walled. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is in practice, although the addition of farms can confuse the issue somewhat when you're just getting started.

In fact, Carcassonne fits into that category of easy-to-play-hard-to-master games that really thrive as a result of their depths, but unlike Catan, there is a strong element of luck at play which means even the inexperienced can pull off a win if the tiles fall in their favour. One of the key things to master is the use of your followers: each player is given seven of these little guys, and you use them to claim cities, roads, monasteries and farms when you lay down a tile. You get them back when you complete a city, road or a monastery, while they must remain on the farm until the end of a game. Claim too much without completion and you may find yourself without any followers, rendering any tiles you lay useless to yourself until you free up a follower.

What makes this game perfect for the Arcade is the fact that there's no player elimination or direct aggression in Carcassonne, making it both family friendly and a nice, laid back multiplayer experience either locally with 4 players or over Xbox Live with 5 players. This isn't to say you can't play competitively – you can prematurely complete someone's city to limit their points, or lay down extra pieces that make it harder for them to close off the city, or even strategically lay down tiles nearby to limit their expansion or make completing a road or city almost impossible.

Carcassonne's strength is its simplicity, which is reflected throughout the Xbox Live Arcade iteration. Possibly the single greatest feature is that the game keeps track of your score for you as you progress and automatically tallies up any extra points you receive at the end of the game (half points for incomplete cities, calculating your farms etc) which increases the pace of play wonderfully. A good game of Carcassonne can take as little as fifteen or twenty minutes, and even with four people the built-in turn timer ensures things don't drag on for too long.

The visuals are also simple, rendered predominantly in two dimensions until a city or monastery is completed. It won't win any awards for the best looking Arcade title around, but the tiles are clear and the fact you can zoom and tilt mean you'll never be confused as to what piece you have and how it works. The game won't let you move a piece into a location it cannot fit either, which limits problems even more. Simplicity does have its drawbacks: the music is irritating and loops continuously – a few other tracks would've fixed this, and the sound effects are sporadic but get the job done at least.

What makes Carcassonne last the distance is the level of customisation on offer: most of the rules can be adjusted to your preferences, and the game comes bundled free with the first of many (there's at least ten!) expansion packs. The included one, titled The River, replaces the default starting tile with twelve pieces of a long river that effectively bisects the playing field while adding bridges as well, which opens up a bunch of new strategic options. Like the rules, the expansion can be easily adjusted when setting up your game, and no doubt the more detailed expansions will have even more options available to tailor the experience. The notion of many of the board game's popular add-ons making its way to the Arcade is great, although it is likely to complicate things if your friends do not possess the new content as well.