Don't forget to get Carcassonne for free while you can!

Don't forget to hop on your Xbox 360 today and grab yourself a free game. In celebration of Xbox Live's fifth birthday, Microsoft is stuffing your Christmas stocking early, but only for a limited time, with the board game turned turn-based strategy game, Carcassonne. I downloaded it a few hours ago and took it for a spin and it's quite fun.

Anytime you can get something for free, it's at least worth a look, and in this case, it's actually worth more than a look. A game of Carcassonne is played on a gridded board using 72 tiles as the playing pieces. These tiles have a certain symmetry to them, so you can create matching connections between them, with the objective being to construct self-contained cities, roads, farms and more. With the tiles looking like squares snipped out of Google Earth, they need to be rotated then placed on the board in such a way as to form the largest properties possible.

The tiles’ symmetry means that roads will line up, though a roadway has to end cleanly, such as an intersection. Each player has a certain number of “followers” that can be placed on contiguous land areas, roads and fields as a way to “claim” it for yourself. When an element of geography is completed—such as a city having a complete, unbroken wall around it; or a monastery piece being fully circled by eight other tiles—the followers indicate who is the owner, and therefore who’ll get the points.

The game is easy to learn and surprisingly full of strategy. The graphics are charming and up to par with most of the better XBLA offerings.

You have until midnight tomorrow night to get Carcassonne for free, so what are you waiting for? Go!

Read a full review of Carcassonne here.