Carcassonne is a game of tile placement. One by one you draw a random tile and have to place it on the board so that it is adjacent to at least one previously played tile. All tile edges have to match up.
Here we see a rather large pile of tiles. This is, of course, 2 full games + a bunch of expansions. With this many tiles, a game can take up to 2 1/2 hours to play, but with a base game (and perhaps a sane number of expansions) games take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.
As you can see, some tiles contain road pieces, some contain parts of cities, and so on. You can also see that we have placed dots on the backs of all of our tiles. The color and amount of dots on each tile represents which expansion set it comes from, so that we can easily sort out tiles if we want a smaller game (for teaching new people, for example).
