Carcassonne is a tile-placement game in which the players draw and place a tile with a piece of southern French landscape on it. The tile might feature a city, a road, a cloister, grassland or some combination thereof, and it must be placed adjacent to tiles that have already been played, in such a way that cities are connected to cities, roads to roads, etcetera. Having placed a tile, the player can then decide to place one of his meeples on one of the areas on it: on the city as a knight, on the road as a robber, on a cloister as a monk, or on the grass as a farmer. When that area is complete, that meeple scores points for its owner.

The sixth edition of the Carcassonne Big Box contains the Carcassonne base game, the Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders expansions, the mini-expansions The River and The Abbot now included with the base game, and the six mini-expansions from 2012: The Flying Machines, The Messengers, The Ferries, The Gold Mines, Mage & Witch, and The Robbers (which collectively include the tiles for the Corn Circles II mini-expansion).