Epic Games Store’s New Free Games Are Now Available

It’s Thursday! And that means there’s a new bevy of free video games available via Epic Games Store. More specifically, this week the digital board games Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride are available for free, and given that both can provide hours and hours of fun in physical form, folks are likely to find plenty to do with the digital versions.

As always, the usual caveats apply here. The two games are only free for a week, but if claimed during that time, remain in a user’s Epic Games Store library after that. Also, they are limited to the Epic Games Store, which just about everyone should be familiar with at this point.

In a slightly unusual twist, it would appear that Pandemic — which was announced as one of this week’s free games — was removed from the list of offerings. Given the nature of the video game, which is about plagues sweeping the globe, and the ongoing coronavirus outbreak in China, one imagines that someone probably thought better of including it.

Here’s how Epic Games Store describes Carcassonne on its official product page:

“Carcassonne is a modern classic tile-placement game based on the award wining 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, et cetera. The player can then decide to place one of his followers, so called 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. Each new game is a new experience thanks to the ever-changing landscape.”

Here’s how Epic Games Store describes Ticket to Ride on its official product page:

“The official adaptation of Days of Wonder’s best-selling train board game, Ticket to Ride takes less than one minute to learn but a lifetime to master. Over 70 million games played online and a new game starting every 4 seconds on average! In addition to the exciting cross-platform asynchronous multiplayer mode, players will enjoy an intuitive user interface, social media capabilities to share exciting moments, and brand new maps.”

What do you think about this week’s freebies on Epic Games Store? Are you excited to play some digital board games? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!

Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride are available now, and will be available until February 13th. At that point, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Aztez will be available for free on Epic Games Store until February 20th. You can check out all of our previous coverage of Epic Games Store right here.