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.

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra

| T3d-1978

Created by Michael Kiesling, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra challenges players to carefully select glass panes to complete their windows while being careful not to damage or waste supplies in the process. The window panels are double-sided, providing players with a dynamic player board that affords nearly infinite variability!

Players can expect to discover new unique art and components in Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, including translucent window pane pieces, a tower to hold discarded glass panes, and double-sided player boards and window pane panels, in addition to many other beautiful components!

Game Mechanics:

  • Open Drafting
  • Pattern Building
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.01

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small 🟢

| T3d-1978

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small is a new take on Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola designed for exactly two players and focused only on the animal husbandry aspect of that game. So long plows and veggies!

In Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, you become an animal breeder of horses, cows, sheep and pigs and try to make the most of your pastures. Players start with a 3×2 game board that can be expanded during play to give more room for players to grow and animals to run free. Sixteen possible actions are available for players to take, with each player taking three actions total in each of the eight rounds.

The player who amasses the most victory points through enclosing space with fences and acquiring the largest number and variety of animals and victory point-generating buildings will be the winner.

Four Standard Buildings and 4 special buildings are available in the base game. These buildings each provide unique special abilities during play and/or VP at game end. Balancing the tension between building infrastructure (fenced pastures and buildings) and acquiring animals (the single biggest source of end-game scoring) is the key to success!

Game Mechanics:

  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.35

Acquire 🟢

| T3d-1978

In Acquire, each player strategically invests in businesses, trying to retain a majority of stock. As the businesses grow with tile placements, they also start merging, giving the majority stockholders of the acquired business sizable bonuses, which can then be used to reinvest into other chains. All of the investors in the acquired company can then cash in their stocks for current value or trade them 2-for-1 for shares of the newer, larger business. The game is a race to acquire the greatest wealth.

Game Mechanics:

  • City Building
  • Economic
  • Hand Management
  • Stock Holding
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.50

The Whatnot Cabinet

| T3d-1978
The Whatnot Cabinet

The Whatnot Cabinet

THE WHATNOT CABINET
A Game of Rare, Unusual and Intriguing Objects

CURIOUS COLLECTIONS
Everyone enjoys discovering small, precious objects along beaches, trails, and the wilderness, but a special few have a knack for assembling those found objects into a curio collection. Leave your house, uncover intriguing objects, assemble them in your whatnot cabinet, and create a wonderful collection of curiosities.

OBJECTIVE
Collect tiny objects and score the most points by creating the best whatnot cabinet. Each round players travel away from home to find trinkets and doodads to add to their cabinets. As they do, they score curio points for sets of like objects, different, and various other unique setups.

Game Mechanics:

  • Open Drafting
  • Puzzle
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.73

Tsuro of the Seas

| T3d-1978
Tsuro of the Seas

Tsuro of the Seas

The basic game play of Tsuro of the Seas resembles that of Tom McMurchie’s Tsuro: Players each have a ship that they want to sail — that is, keep on the game board — as long as possible. Whoever stays on the board the longest wins the game.

Each turn players add “wake” tiles to the 7×7 game board; each tile has two “wake connections” on each edge, and as the tiles are placed on the board, they create a connected network of paths. If a wake is placed in front of a ship, that ship then sails to the end of the wake. If the ship goes off the board, that player is out of the game.

What’s new in Tsuro of the Seas are daikaiju tiles, representing sea monsters and other creatures of the deep. Notably, daikaiju can move: each tile has five arrows, four for moving in each of the cardinal directions and another one for rotation. On the active player’s turn, he rolls two six-sided dice; on a sum of 6, 7, or 8, the daikaiju will move, while on any other sum they’ll stay in place. To determine which direction the daikaiju tiles move, the player then makes a second roll, this time with a single die. On 1-5 in the second roll, each daikaiju moves according to its matching arrow. On a 6 in the second roll, a new daikaiju tile is added to the board.

If a daikaiju tile hits a wake tile, a ship, or another daikaiju tile, the object hit is removed from the game. Another way to be ousted! The more daikaiju tiles on the game board, the faster players will find themselves trying to breathe water…

Game Mechanics:

  • Abstract Strategy
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hand Management
  • Network Building
  • Player Elimination
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 8 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.43

Tsuro

| T3d-1978
Tsuro

Tsuro

A beautiful and beautifully simple game of laying a tile before your own token to continue its path on each turn. The goal is to keep your token on the board longer than anyone else’s, but as the board fills up this becomes harder because there are fewer empty spaces left… and another player’s tile may also extend your own path in a direction you’d rather not go. Easy to introduce to new players, Tsuro lasts a mere 15 minutes and actually does work for any number from 2 to 8.

Game Mechanics:

  • Abstract Strategy
  • Hand Management
  • Network Building
  • Player Elimination
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 8 Players
  • 15 – 20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.23

Traintopia

| T3d-1978
Traintopia

Traintopia

It is a truly wonderful day indeed as today we start our great competition! At the dawn of the nation of Traintopia — a country of clean, efficient, and fast transportation — we are looking for a new president, and we know exactly who we want for the job!

In Traintopia, you must create a futuristic train paradise with networks and routes for goods, commuters, and tourists. Exactly how do you do that? It’s simple! On your turn:

  1. Draft a tile, commuter, tourist, mailbag, or a train from the current offer.
  2. Expand your network by adding the newly drafted component to it.

Tiles expand your routes. Commuters and tourists score victory points when placed. Mailbags and trains provide end-game bonuses. In more detail, the game tiles feature train tracks passing through different types of districts sought after by different types of commuters. Additionally, along the route you will find various landmarks that draw tourists. You must strike the right balance to maximize your scoring potential.

After eight or nine rounds (depending on the number of players), the game ends, then players score completed routes and gain bonus victory points from individual goal cards.

Game Mechanics:

  • Open Drafting
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.80

Seikatsu

| T3d-1978
Seikatsu

Seikatsu

In Seikatsu, players take turns placing tiles into a shared garden area, with each tile showing a colored flower and colored bird. Players score for groups of birds as they place them, but they score for rows of flowers only at the end of the game and only for the rows of flowers that exist from their perspective, i.e., that are viewable as lines from where they sit at the game board.

Game Mechanics:

  • Abstract Strategy
  • Hand Management
  • Pattern Building
  • Puzzle
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 15 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.58

Scooby Doo! Betrayal at Mystery Mansion

| T3d-1978
Scooby Doo! Betrayal at Mystery Mansion

Scooby Doo! Betrayal at Mystery Mansion

Based on the award-winning Betrayal at House on the Hill board game, Betrayal at Mystery Mansion is the mash-up fans have been clamoring for!

Play as Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne, or Fred as you explore the mansion and its grounds, finding clues, encountering strange occurrences, and maybe even catching sight of a monster! When you find enough clues to learn what’s really going on, that’s when the haunt starts, and one player will switch sides to play the role of the monster! Will you be able to stop them before they carry out their sinister plan?

Betrayal at Mystery Mansion contains 25 new haunts based on popular episodes and movies from the Scooby-Doo oeuvre, with different monsters, items, events, and locations each time you play.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Grid Movement
  • Role Playing
  • Storytelling
  • Team Based
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 5 Players
  • 25 – 50 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.80

Savannah Park

| T3d-1978
Savannah Park

Savannah Park

In Savannah Park, you each run your own wildlife park, and your goal is to group animals with their own kind — but everyone takes turns deciding what to move, so you might not be able to shuffle animals into the right spaces.

Each player starts the game with the same set of 33 unique animal tiles, with those tiles laid out at random in your personal wildlife park. Three bush-fire spaces and one rock space will remain unoccupied in your park for the entire game, and six tree spaces and four grass spaces are unoccupied at the start of play.

On a turn, you name a specific face-up tile that all players must pick up, flip face down, then move to a different empty space within their own park. Tiles that have been flipped cannot move again, and once all tiles have moved, the game ends with a scoring round. First, tiles adjacent to bush fires are removed if they depict as many animals as the number of fires (1, 2, or 3) on the bush-fire space. Score for each grass and tree uncovered on your board. Finally, score for each of the six animal species; the bigger the main herd of each of species and the more water holes it contains, the more points you score, e.g. a herd of five rhinos and three watering holes is worth (5×3) 15 points. The player with the most points wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Abstract Strategy
  • Pattern Building
  • Puzzle
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.70