Tag: Tile Placement

Games with Tile Placement mechanics require players to place tiles on a game board to create and modify the game’s environment.

Gardlings

| OTSG Staff

Cleverly build your garden. Harvest gems and enrich your seed bag with new, amazing creatures so your next garden can grow even more abundant. Combine the unique abilities of your creatures, and be the first to acquire the victory trophy.

Each round in Gardlings, all players simultaneously build their garden in front of themselves. You do this by drawing and placing tiles from your bag. You may stop drawing tiles at any time because if you draw too many gnomes, they will steal gems from you. At the end of the round, use any gems you matched in your garden to buy a new tile, then return all of your tiles to your bag to prepare for the next round. Each tile features potential ways to match gems, as well as a creature with a special ability. Your garden will grow larger and better each round, and the puzzle of placing tiles will become increasingly complex.

The goal of the game is to match enough gems to buy the victory tile.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.47

From the Moon

| OTSG Staff

In From the Moon, players are representatives of factions trying to complete missions departing from our Moon in order to help humankind survive elsewhere in the galaxy. Indeed, the fate of the Earth is sealed, and time is running out!

The plan is to launch three survival missions before all life on Earth ends. To do that, each faction will contribute by building parts of the ships and build their own lunar base to store the necessary resources.

In the end, which faction will be most suited to lead the future of our race out there, far away in space?

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.47

Fountains

| OTSG Staff

Welcome to the elegant city of Florimelle, where a grand beautification effort has begun. In Fountains, you’ll become a master Fountaineer tasked with transforming Florimelle’s gardens and plazas by creating the most magnificent Fountain the world has ever seen!

Fountains is a take-and-make game in which each player starts with a round fountain that features a spout and room for four features.

On a turn, move one of the tokens 1-3 spaces clockwise around the central board, skipping occupied spaces, to land on an empty space. You then take the top tile next to this token and add it to your board. You can expand out or up or both, but you want to ensure that you have a spout at your highest level and water flowing through all of your lower levels or else you’ll have dead zones that won’t score. If you stop next to the tiny oval features instead of a tile stack, choose one of these features and add it to an empty space in your fountain.

When someone lands on the green, blue, or white space with the matching colored token, everyone scores for the linked item: lilypads, separate pools linked by constant water flow, and fish. (Fish come in three types, and the player who scores fish chooses which color scores.) For each item, you score 1, 2, 3, etc. points if the item is on the first, second, third, etc. level.

When a player hits a point threshold, players then score for all three colors once again, as well as endgame bonuses such as 2 points per coin icon and 4 points for a set of fish in the three colors.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.18

Foundations of Rome

| OTSG Staff

The city-building board game Foundations of Rome puts you into the role of an architect competing to own land and build magnificent structures! Build domūs and insulae, fountains, foundries, and more to increase your renown – gaining glory for yourself and the empire! With 96 wonderfully detailed miniatures in the base game, Foundations of Rome is a testament to the glory of Rome that you can bring to the table.

Foundations of Rome is the next, and biggest game to date, in the Dice Tower Essentials line and is designed by famed designer Emerson Matsuuchi. With a quick setup time and easy to learn to rules you will be on your way to achieving glory within Rome in no time!

On a player’s turn they select from purchasing a new lot, building a new building in the shared city of Rome, or collecting income!

Players collect Glory Points at the end of each round based on the population and commerce they have brought to the city as well as gaining glory for civic buildings that score not only based on their own buildings, but those of their opponents!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.99

Castle Combo

| OTSG Staff

Castle Combo is a tableau-building game that combines simplicity with deep, engaging gameplay, offering highly satisfying experiences.

Each player will spend coins to draft 9 cards from 2 open markets on the table (the lower and upper city), creating along the game a 3×3 square of people interacting with each other to trigger instant effects and end-of-game bonuses.

Each turn, you add a character to your tableau — a seemingly straightforward action that packs a punch regarding strategic decisions. You’ll need to carefully manage your Keys to influence the Messenger pawn at critical moments, as it controls which characters are available for recruitment from two different areas – peasants and nobles.

Balancing your Gold reserves is equally important, ensuring you can afford the characters that best suit your strategy throughout the game. Selecting the right characters is crucial to maximising their immediate effects and the points they will contribute at the game’s end. Finally, carefully arranging these characters on your 3×3 board is key to unlocking their full potential.

After everyone has played 9 turns (i.e., everyone has 9 characters in front of them), the player with the most points in their tableau wins the game.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 10 – 25 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.73

Forbidden Jungle

| OTSG Staff

In Forbidden Jungle, your team has crash-landed on a mysterious jungle planet, and you need to work together to survive. Search the ruins of an abandoned outpost for an elusive escape portal, all while fending off an ever-growing horde of venomous creatures and an escalating chain of collapsing locations. Shift tiles to power up the portal and live to see another day!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.10

Floristry

| OTSG Staff

Floristry is a 2 player, tile-laying game. Players compete at the historic Aalsmeer Dutch Auction to win the best flowers and then use them to create the most charming window display.

Each round features a Dutch auction, where the clock counts down from 15 seconds while the price drops every 3 seconds. The unique web app runs your auctions, so you have to think fast, bid carefully, and pay close attention to get what you want at the right price– but also keep an eye on what your rival needs.

Players simultaneously and strategically place their new flowers into their storefront frame. At the end of the game, players will earn Charm from their largest patch of each flower type, and whoever has the most Charm wins.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 15 – 20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.25

Fit to Print

| OTSG Staff

Fit to Print is a puzzly tile-laying game about breaking news, designed by Peter McPherson and set in a charming woodland world created by Ian O’Toole!

Thistleville is the world’s most bustling little town — it’s a challenge to keep up with everything going on, from who took home first prize for their baked goods at the community fair to who has been digging in Mrs. Brambleberry’s carrot patch.

As an editor at one of the local newspapers, your job is to tell their stories!

The front page is due in just a few hours and you have no time for perfection. Grab the big stories before the other papers get a chance, and make sure you get the right photos too. A newspaper is a business, so the money has to come from somewhere — don’t forget the ads! After you’ve picked out a combination of stories, photos, and ads, it’s time to lay out the front page. Did you take enough tiles to fill the paper, but not so many that things have to be cut? Over the course of three hectic days, your skills will be tested as you compete to be the most newsworthy editor!

Fit To Print is a tile-laying game for the whole family. Players simultaneously collect newspaper tiles, stacking them on their desks until they think they have what they need to make the perfect front page. Then, they will yell “Layout!” and begin to lay out the page by carefully considering the placement of centerpieces, articles, photographs, and advertisements. When everything is just right, they yell “Print” to be the first off the press and gain their choice of centerpiece for the next round! This hectic spatial puzzle features over 100 unique newspaper tiles, 6 characters with their own special abilities, as well as 3 decks of Breaking News cards — so that each and every time you play you will be solving a new puzzle!

If real-time games aren’t your style, Fit to Print has a number of alternative modes to satisfy every type of puzzle gamer. In Slo-Mode players take turns drafting tiles from a shared market and arranging them on their front pages. In Puzzle Mode, take a specific set of tiles and piece together the highest-scoring arrangements. Whether you enjoy relaxing solo puzzles on your own, or frenetic action for up to 6 players, you will have a blast helping the critters of Thistleville tell their stories!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • 15 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.12

Downtown Farmers Market

| OTSG Staff

Downtown Farmers Market takes you to your favorite time of the weekend, but today’s trip might require a little bit more thinking than usual. Your task: Line up eight challenge tiles to create two axes, then place an ingredient tile at the intersection of two challenge requirements each turn.

At the end of the game, check which rows and columns have the ingredients required to complete the corresponding challenges and earn points!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.42

Escape from New York

| OTSG Staff

“You go in, find the President, bring him out in less than 24 hours, and you’re a free man.”

In Escape from New York, an adaptation of the John Carpenter movie of the same name, you play as Snake, Brain, Maggie, or Cabbie and attempt to rescue the president and his precious tape and bring them to safety, while dealing with the gangs of the most dangerous prison in the world – all of Manhattan.

You will play the roles of the heroes, exploring the dangerous streets of New York, searching for the president, his case containing the government tape, and a diagram of the bridges so you can escape from the city without stepping on a landmine.

You can work together, searching for these three things, or you may decide to secretly satisfy your own personal objective at any moment during the game, escaping from New York alone and betraying your companions. Whatever your decision will be, you must face the Bands of Manhattan, headed by the Duke of New York, who will hinder you by moving Prisoners and Bosses to eat up as much of the short time-frame you have to complete your mission.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 40 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.57