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.

Trickerion

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Trickerion

Trickerion

Trickerion is a competitive Euro-style strategy game set in a fictional world inspired by the late 19th century urban life and culture, spiced with a pinch of supernatural.

Players take on the roles of rival stage illusionists, each with their own strengths and characteristics. They are striving for fortune and fame in a competition hosted by a legendary magician, looking for a successor worthy of the mighty Trickerion Stone, which is fabled to grant supernatural power to its owner.

Using worker placement and simultaneous action selection mechanisms, the Illusionists and their teams of helpers — the Engineer, the Assistant, the Manager, and a handful of Apprentices – obtain blueprints and components for increasingly complex magic tricks, expand the team and set up performances by visiting the Downtown, Dark Alley, Market Row and Theater locations on the main game board depicting a late 19th century cityscape.

The tricks are stored and prepared on the Magician’s own Workshop game board, while the performances themselves take place at the Theater in the form of a tile placement mini-game with lots of player interaction. The performances yield Fame points and Coins to their owners based on the tricks they consist of. Fame points have multiple uses, but they also serve as a win condition – After turn 7, when the last Performance card is revealed, the game ends and the illusionist with the most Fame points wins.

The game offers 48 different Tricks to be learned from the Optical, Spiritual, Mechanical and Escape categories, over 90 character abilities, and 40 Special Assignment cards that influence the actions taken at the various game locations. The base game can be expanded with two optional rule modules to add further strategic depth to the game.

The “Dark Alley” expansion included in the base game adds a new location to the game. It also comes with 48 new Special Assignment cards, a new tier of Tricks, and 27 Prophecy tokens that can alter certain game rules turn by turn, giving the game additional variety.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Dice Rolling
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.24

On Mars

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On Mars

On Mars

Following the success of unmanned rover missions, the United Nations established the Department of Operations and Mars Exploration (D.O.M.E.). The first settlers arrived on Mars in the year 2037 and in the decades after establishment Mars Base Camp, private exploration companies began work on the creation of a self-sustaining colony. As chief astronaut for one of these enterprises, you want to be a pioneer in the development of the biggest, most advanced colony on Mars by achieving both D.O.M.E. mission goals as well as your company’s private agenda.

In the beginning, you will be dependent on supplies from Earth and will have to travel often between the Mars Space Station and the planet’s surface. As the colony expands over time, you will shift your activities to construct mines, power generators, water extractors, greenhouses, oxygen factories, and shelters. Your goal is to develop a self-sustaining colony independent of any terrestrial organization. This will require understanding the importance of water, air, power, and food — the necessities for survival.

Do you dare take part in humankind’s biggest challenge?

On Mars is played over several rounds, each consisting of two phases – the Colonization Phase ​and the Shuttle Phase​.

During the Colonization Phase, each player takes a turn during which they take actions. The available actions depend on the side of the board they are on. If you are in orbit, you can take blueprints, buy and develop technologies, and take supplies from the Warehouse. If you are on the surface of the planet, you can construct buildings with your bots, upgrade these buildings using blueprints, take scientists and new contracts, welcome new ships, and explore the planet’s surface with your rover. In the Shuttle Phase, players may travel between the colony and the Space Station in orbit.

All buildings on Mars have a dependency on each other and some are required for the colony to grow. Building shelters for Colonists to live in requires oxygen; generating oxygen requires plants; growing plants requires water; extracting water from ice requires power; generating power requires mining minerals; and mining minerals requires Colonists. Upgrading the colony’s ability to provide each of these resources is vital. As the colony grows, more shelters are needed so that the Colonists can survive the inhospitable conditions on Mars.

During the game, players are also trying to complete missions. Once a total of three missions have been completed, the game ends. To win the game, players must contribute to the development of the first colony on Mars. This is represented during the game by players gaining Opportunity Points (OP). The player with the most OP at the end of the game is declared the winner.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • City Building
  • Closed Drafting
  • Economic
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 90 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.66

Wayfarers of the South Tigris

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Wayfarers of the South Tigris

Wayfarers of the South Tigris

Wayfarers of the South Tigris is set during the height of the Abbasid Caliphate, circa 820 AD. As brave explorers, cartographers and astronomers, players set off from Baghdad to map the surrounding land, waterways, and heavens above. Players must carefully manage their caravan of workers and equipment, while reporting back regularly to journal their findings at the House of Wisdom. Will you succeed in impressing the Caliph, or lose your way and succumb to the wilderness?

The aim of Wayfarers of the South Tigris is to be the player with the most victory points (VP) at the game’s end. Points are primarily gained by mapping the land, water, and sky. Players can also gain points from upgrading their caravans, by gaining inspiration from nobles, and by influencing the three guilds of science, trade and exploration. As they make discoveries, players will want to quickly journal their progress. The game ends once one player’s marker has reached the far right column of the journal track.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection
  • Tableau Building
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.64

Tigris & Euphrates

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Tigris & Euphrates

Tigris & Euphrates

Regarded by many as Reiner Knizia’s masterpiece, Tigris & Euphrates is set in the ancient fertile crescent with players building civilizations through tile placement. Players are given four different leaders: farming, trading, religion, and government. The leaders are used to collect victory points in these same categories. However, your score at the end of the game is the number of points in your weakest category, which encourages players not to get overly specialized. Conflict arises when civilizations connect on the board, i.e., external conflicts, with only one leader of each type surviving such a conflict. Leaders can also be replaced within a civilization through internal conflicts.

Starting in the Mayfair edition from 2008, Tigris & Euphrates included a double-sided game board and extra components for playing an advanced version of the game. This “ziggurat expansion”, initially released as a separate item in Germany for those who already owned the base game, is a special monument that extends across five spaces of the board. The monument can be built if a player has a cross of five civilization tokens of the same color by discarding those five tokens and replacing them with the ziggurat markers, placing a ziggurat tower upon the middle tile. The five ziggurat markers cannot be destroyed. All rules regarding monuments apply to the ziggurat monument as well. If your king is inside the kingdom of the ziggurat, you will get one victory point in a color of your choice at the end of your turn.

Game Mechanics:

  • Abstract Strategy
  • Area Control
  • Civilization
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.50

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

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Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is a game created by Ignacy Trzewiczek, the author of Stronghold. This time Trzewiczek takes the players to a deserted island, where they’ll play the parts of shipwreck survivors confronted by an extraordinary adventure. They’ll be faced with the challenges of building a shelter, finding food, fighting wild beasts, and protecting themselves from weather changes. Building walls around their homes, animal domestication, constructing weapons and tools from what they find, and much more await them on the island. The players decide in which direction the game will unfold and – after several in-game weeks of hard work – how their settlement will look. Will they manage to discover the secret of the island in the meantime? Will they find a pirate treasure, or an abandoned village? Will they discover an underground city or a cursed temple at the bottom of a volcano? Answers to these questions lie in hundreds of event cards and hundreds of object and structure cards that can be used during the game…

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is an epic game from Portal. You will build a shelter, palisade, weapons, you will create tools like axes, knives, sacks, you will do everything you can to… to survive. You will have to find food, fight wild beasts, protect yourself from weather changes…

Take the role of one of four characters from the ship crew (cook, carpenter, explorer, or soldier) and face the adventure. Use your determination skills to help your teammates, discuss with them your plan, and put it into practice. Debate, discuss, and work on the best plan you all can make.

Search for treasures. Discover mysteries. Follow goals of six different, engaging scenarios. Start by building a big pile of wood and setting it on fire to call for help, and then start new adventures. Become an exorcist on cursed Island. Become a treasure hunter on Volcano Island. Become a rescue team for a young lady who’s stuck on rock island…

Let the adventure live!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Movement
  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling
  • Narrative Choice
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.80

Praga Caput Regni

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Praga Caput Regni

Praga Caput Regni

Charles IV has been crowned King of Bohemia and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. From his castle in Prague, he oversees construction of new fortifications: a bridge across the Vltava River, a university, and a cathedral rising within the walls of the castle itself. Prague is already among the largest cities in Europe. King Charles will make it the capital of an empire!

In Praga Caput Regni, players take the role of wealthy citizens who are organizing various building projects in medieval Prague. By expanding their wealth and joining in the construction, they gain favor with the king. Players choose from six actions on the game board — the “action crane” — that are always available, but which are weighted with a constantly shifting array of costs and benefits. By using these actions, you can increase your resources, improve the strength of your chosen actions, and build “New Prague City”, the Charles Bridge, or city walls. You can possibly gain additional actions or even participate in the construction of St. Vitus Cathedral.

Clever players will discover synergies between carefully timed actions and the rewards from constructing civic projects as all of the mechanisms mesh together. At the end of the game, the player who most impressed King Charles wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • City Building
  • Puzzle
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.74

Pipeline

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Pipeline

Pipeline

The refinement of oil has long been part of the government-controlled energy sector. Amassed with an incredibly complex and inefficient system of refineries, the government has felt the severe pressures of worldwide demand and the ever-increasing global standards for refinement. Unable to keep up with demand, the government has only one option: privatizing the oil industry.

This is where you come in. Seeking to capitalize on this new opportunity, in Pipeline you start a company in the oil business. You will focus on building a much more efficient pipeline network in your refinery, hiring experts that provide valuable benefits over your competitors, and managing the logistics of purchasing and selling your refined oil in the various markets. You will need more than strong economic skills – carefully crafting an interweaving network of pipelines just might ensure your victory!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Drafting
  • Economic
  • Network Building
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.89

Now or Never

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Now or Never

Now or Never

Far to the south of The Last Ruin lies a cliffside village called The Monument. For generations, it protected an ancient shrine until the day a crystal meteorite descended. The meteor’s denizens slowly crept out into the world—bizarre monstrosities from nightmare, attacking all in their path. As they spread across the land, there was no intelligent malice nor grand invasion strategy; the creatures acted like a fungus—spreading into new territory sporadically. After many fruitless attempts to expel the monsters, the people of The Monument fled as their village crumbled, exiled to distant lands, resigned to a nomadic existence.

Twenty years later, there are rumors that the bizarre monsters are growing weak. They’re slower, less impervious to attack, some undergoing a gradual petrification until they crumble to dust. Is it the atmosphere? Are they dying of old age? Do they suffer from a strange disease? No one is certain, but as the news spreads, various factions set their eyes on the vacant, ruined village of The Monument. The original villagers, now refugees, are desperate to return and rebuild. But they must do it quickly, before someone else claims their home. This is their chance. It’s now or never.

In Now or Never, you and up to three friends compete to best rebuild your ancestral village and guide the rest of the villagers on their journey home. Although the creatures of the meteorite have lost much of their strength, many of them remain, and you must fight them off to protect traveling villagers. Now or Never is the third game in the Arzium storybook series that includes Above and Below and Near and Far.

Now or Never is a competitive strategy game that allows you to:

  • Choose one of four asymmetrical characters to play.
  • Rebuild the village so that returning villagers have a place to live. You must carefully choose what and where to build to maintain an advantage, earning the biggest rewards for long-term planning.
  • Interact with other players by hiring their specialists to perform special actions.
  • Combat dangerous creatures to rescue villagers.
  • Explore a fantasy landscape filled with bizarre places, technology, and peoples.

Now or Never includes two modes of play: standard and story. When playing in story mode, you read from a storybook when you explore, making choices and learning more about the characters and the world. Each character has their own set of stories, unique to the locations they explore and diverse in plot, perspective, and motive, allowing you to choose what direction your own story will take.

Journey to The Monument and help rebuild your ancient home!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Drafting
  • City Building
  • Hand Management
  • Narrative Choice
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 90 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.67

Living Planet

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Living Planet

Living Planet

In Living Planet, each player represents one major Galactic Corporation exploiting the distant planet MYC.14.250. Each one of them is eager to industrialize the planet and generate as much profit as possible before the planet self-destructs.

To do so, you’ll have to explore the planet to grow the map. You’ll manage your team to extract resources with factory buildings you’ve built, and trade resources at the stock market to make money. And above anything else, you’ll have to handle cataclysms generated by the planet. But cataclysms don’t happen randomly, players trigger them through their actions, using their card set. Confrontation between players will take place through the planet.

Players will alternately take the leader role for each turn. Each turn follows a specific game turn sequence. Every player will have some actions to accomplish at a turn, in the order the Leader chooses, resolving the sequence : Resources production – Action (Explore, Move, Construct, Trade…) – Cataclysms.

At the end of the game each player will earn victory points based on how much money they have and how many buildings and vehicles they control.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Economic
  • Grid Movement
  • Hand Management
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.64

Flotilla

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In 1954, with an explosion over a hundred thousand times more powerful than even the wildest estimates, the Castle Bravo nuclear test obliterated the Bikini Atoll, and ruptured the Earth down to its mantle.

As water levels rose in the aftermath, the remnants of humanity fled their homes and took to the sea. World leadership came together to build a massive Flotilla, mankind’s last bastion of civilization.

Now, ten years after the disaster, the Flotilla is home to the very last of us.

Flotilla features two distinct and interwoven modes of gameplay, as you try to outpace your opponents in bringing prosperity to humanity’s new home. You begin the game as a “Sinkside” Fleet Commander, commissioned by world leaders to explore the new face of the ocean, scour the depths for resources, and rescue any survivors you come across. At any point in the game, you may choose to turn “Skyside,” by selling your skiffs, and leaving your seafaring life behind to now grow the Flotilla itself.

The choice of if or when to switch from a “Sinkside” explorer to a “Skyside” settler defines the very core experience of Flotilla. They represent two similar but distinct game experiences, utilizing the same game components, seamlessly intertwined among all players. If you switch, you’ll flip over all of your accumulated game components, watching your crew grow into new roles with new art for the same characters, while finding entirely new uses for your ocean tiles and resources, and beginning to trade with the “Sinkside” players as you go after new objectives. As players turn “Skyside,” different niches are filled, forever changing the game’s economy. Mastering this ebb and flow will be critical if you’re to shape the new face of humanity!

As a “Sinksider,” you will explore the ocean with your skiffs, pulling some of the 92 hexagon-shaped ocean tiles out of a bag, and arranging them to help you effectively collect resources, discover valuable artifacts from the sunken civilization, all while trying to avoid toxic radiation left from the disaster. You’ll dive for supplies, rolling a pool of custom dive dice that vary based on the depth level of your skiffs. You’ll also carefully manage your resources, trading them on the open market for the currency you can use to buy more skiffs and outposts, or stockpiling them for when you turn “Skyside.”

As a “Skysider,” you will use your resources to build an expansive network of watercraft and docks, using the “Skyside” of your ocean tiles. Your divers will also have new jobs as researchers, rolling custom, multicolor Research dice, to discover new technologies that allow the Flotilla to manage a growing population. You’ll also build Sonar stations, making life a little easier for the “Sinksiders” still out exploring the unknown, while earning quite a few points for yourself.

On both sides, you’ll also grow your relationships with the four different governing guilds, each giving you unique bonuses and more powerful crew. The players with the strongest relationships will also earn valuable points at the end of the game!

The components in Flotilla are unique, immersive, and interconnected. Your skiffs will be able to actually carry up to four resource barrels, and come in a unique shape for each player color. Artifact tokens slot into matching spaces in a double-layered hub board and art on the ocean tiles lines up to create a unique layout for your growing Flotilla each time you play.

In Flotilla, you’ll find significant strategic depth and variety, while giving players the freedom to tell their own story. Will you build the Flotilla by being the first to go Skyside, or stay Sinkside for the whole game, becoming the most powerful seafarer of them all?

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 5 Players
  • 90 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.82