Roads and cities are built by whoever claims them. Monasteries are different. A monastery completes when all eight spaces around it hold tiles, and it does not matter who places those tiles. Put one in the right spot and your opponents spend their turns finishing your 9 points.
Put one in the wrong spot, and your monk sits there all game.
How rare are monasteries?
The base game has 6 monastery tiles among the 71 you draw: 4 plain monasteries surrounded by fields, and 2 with a road running out of them.
That is not many. In a four-player game you draw about 18 tiles, so on average you will draw one or two monasteries yourself, and roughly one game in six you will draw none. In a two-player game you draw about 35, so you will usually draw around three.
So each monastery you draw is a real chance. The question is where to put it.
Where does a monastery fill fastest?
The map grows outward from the start tile, and players place tiles wherever their features are. A monastery fills fastest where many tiles are going to land anyway.
- Close to the middle of the action. Spaces next to busy cities and roads fill as a side effect of other players’ building.
- Next to existing tiles. Every neighbor already on the table is one point banked and one fewer space to fill. A monastery placed with three neighbors already present needs five more; one placed at the edge of the map with one neighbor needs seven.
- Early. An early monastery has the whole game for its spaces to fill.
A monastery at the far edge of the map, placed late, is the classic stuck monk.
Watch all eight spaces, not four
New players look at the four sides of the monastery. The diagonal spaces are where monasteries get stuck.
A diagonal space touches two tiles you can see, so a tile that fills it has to match both. Once a space is boxed in on three or four sides, very few tiles may fit it. Here is the worst case: a space with fields on all four sides can only be filled by a plain monastery, and there are 4 of those in the whole game. A space with a road on one side and fields on the other three is worse still: only the 2 road monasteries fit it.
Before you place, look at the eight spaces around each spot you are considering. If one of them is already a tight hole, choose another spot.
Can an opponent stop your monastery?
They can try. An opponent can place a tile next to one of your empty neighbor spaces so that the space becomes a shape that rarely appears. That costs them a turn of building, so it happens most against a leader, or in two-player games where every point you lose is a point they gain.
Your best defense is placement. A monastery in an open area, with spaces that can be filled from several directions, is hard to block.
Monasteries late in the game
At the end of the game, an unfinished monastery scores 1 point for itself and 1 for each tile around it. That is the same rate as a completed one. Only the meeple’s return is lost.
That makes a late monastery a good use of a spare meeple when the game is almost over. Look for a hole in a crowded part of the map. A monastery dropped in with six or seven neighbors already present scores 7 or 8 points at the end, finished or not. If the tile happens to fill the last space around it, it scores 9 right away and your monk comes home.
How many monks at once?
One monastery in progress is usually comfortable. Two can work if both are in busy areas and your supply is healthy. The trouble starts when a second monk goes on a monastery that is filling slowly, because now two of your seven meeples are waiting on other players.
The meeple economy lesson has the bigger picture. A monastery is a good investment when the table will fill it for you, and a poor one when only you can.
A short checklist
Before placing a monk, ask:
- How many of the eight spaces are already filled?
- Is any empty neighbor a hole that few tiles can fill?
- Will other players want to build next to it anyway?
- How many meeples will I have left?
The Carcassonne strategy guide sums it up the same way: place monasteries early, in the middle, and move on.
Next lesson
Carcassonne Player Counts, Variants, and Expansions
Next, expansions and variants: what changes at two to five players, what the River and Abbot add, and which expansion box to try first.
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