I unwrapped the board game Carcassonne at university. My girlfriend gave it to me for my birthday and I think it’s fair to say, it was not love at first sight. (The board game, of course, not my now wife). All you needed to do was pick a tile at random and match it like a domino, a road piece can go on a road, and a city side can touch a city, she said. That was basically it. It was hard to hide my disgust at what looked like a game for five-year-olds, and I didn’t try very hard, because I was even less gracious than I am now. But despite its simplicity — and the continental title — I kept playing because I vaguely remembered something about not judging a board game by the first five seconds of playing it, or maybe a pang of conscience that you should probably be nice to your girlfriend. I forget which — it was a long time ago.

Each tile is essentially a bit of a map which is placed somewhere next to another piece. You can choose to claim ownership over something on your tile: a road, city, field or cloister by placing a man on it. Eventually a Carcassonne-like map emerges with roads, cloisters and walled cities, owned, or jointly owned by different players.

After inviting more friends to join we began playing regularly with people in our halls of residence, and it was fascinating to see different personalities reflected in gameplay. The unsure or narcissistic types would eschew any collaboration and — North Korea-style — worked solely on their own project. The fear of somebody stealing their city led them to place as many men on it as possible, a hopeless waste of resources. The tinpot Kim Jong Un always lost, but as long as they didn’t work with anybody else, they felt like they’d won.

My wife has an incredible memory of what’s coming up, she should be in Monte Carlo counting cards

The trick is to realise it’s not a zero-sum game and so the more confident, sociable types had a much better chance of winning. By joining as many viable projects as possible you could capitalise on others’ work — as long as you won the PR war by trumpeting every one of your selfless additions to a joint project and glossing over anything else. Any whiff that you’re committing resources to personal projects whilst a collaborative city lies unfinished creates bad blood. A joint construction between players can easily turn into an episode of Grand Designs after the builders haven’t been paid and the couple have divorced. Or, worse, your former city-building partner begins a hostile takeover, finishes the project and takes all the points.

The unplayed tiles remain upside down, but my wife has an incredible memory of what’s still to come. She really should be counting cards in Monte Carlo rather than bothering with us. This means she’s a fiend when it comes to playing what we called “Negative Carcassonne”: a tile placed solely to render an opponent’s project unfinishable. With a finite number of tiles, spaces can emerge that have nothing to fill them and unfinished projects leave valuable men hopelessly stranded on the board until the end. When done sparingly, negative Carcassonne can be very effective, although it can leave feelings running high and is always taken personally by the isolationists.

Fields can span a whole board. As the point-yield is potentially huge, each man placed on a field is committed for the whole game, and often an arms-race, or “farms-race” develops as the game draws to a close, with huge numbers of men placed on unlikely tiles in an attempt to seize control of the biggest unbroken patch of land. But fields take a bit of getting to grips with, and, for an easy life, at least one of our friends avoids them entirely.

As well as the odd cut-throat game with just my wife (which really is a zero-sum game), our university friends still play when we get together. There is still that one person who tries to ruin your city after you’ve just started it, and the one who can’t stand joint-projects.

The personalities haven’t changed and nor has the playing style — we even keep the same colours we settled on 12 years ago.