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.

Northgard

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Northgard: Uncharted Lands

Northgard: Uncharted Lands

Based on the universe of the Northgard video game, Northgard: Uncharted Lands is a game of conquest and exploration set in the age of vikings. Each player controls a Viking clan, looking to achieve victory by reaping glory in various ways or controlling the most prized territories of this new continent.

The game focus is on streamlined rules and mechanisms, allowing for a fast-paced and smooth rhythm of play. Each turn, players alternate their actions to adapt their strategies to their opponents’ moves and the expansion of the board. Fame (i.e., points) can be earned by exploring, fighting, and controlling and developing territories. The various corresponding actions are played through the cards that the players have in hand. At the end of each turn, they have to choose a new card to improve their personal deck as their clans develop new tactics and technologies.

The conquest of Northgard also requires clever management of resources to build new buildings, improve your warriors’ effectiveness, better your hand of cards, and upgrade your clan’s specificities. The winter phase makes this management more difficult as you have to feed your units to keep them healthy and happy.

The pace of the game is set by the players as the game ends after seven turns, but can also be cut short at any time if one of them is in control of three closed territories hosting certain types of buildings.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Campaign
  • Deck Building
  • Dice Rolling
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.73

Newton

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Newton

Newton

The middle of the 17th century was a period of great changes; with the advent of the scientific method came what we now call the Scientific Revolution. Many great scientists, with their theories and ideas, changed and shaped our perception of the universe: Galileo Galilei, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon and, above all, Sir Isaac Newton.

In Newton, the players take the role of a young scientist who wants to become one of the great geniuses of this era. To reach their ultimate goal, they travel around Europe, visit universities and cities, study to discover new theories, build new tools and work to earn money.

The game is played over six rounds. Each round, every player plays five cards from their hand, and each played card allows the player to perform one of the many actions of the game. An action can have a variety of effects, which depend on the symbols on the board. At the end of the round, a player can take back all the cards except for one. One card has to remain on the board, which means that you give up one possibility of doing that action, but also that that very action will be carried out with greater strength. Fortunately, you can acquire new cards with additional powers to perform more actions.

After six rounds, you calculate your final score, and the player with the most VP wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Closed Drafting
  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Tableau Building
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.40

The Magnificent

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The Magnificent

The Magnificent

The Magnificent is a tightly designed Eurogame from the creators of Santa Maria set in a mystical world beautifully illustrated by French artist Martin Mottet.

In the game, players are competing to attract the largest audiences to their shows, featuring magnificent performers. In the process, you must expand your camp by placing Tetris-style tiles on your player board, gather elements needed for the shows, and set up performances in your tents.

On your turn, you take one die from the supply. The value of the chosen die is your strength. Add to this the value of all dice of the same color that you have already collected, then use this strength to carry out one of three main actions: build, travel or perform. The more strength you have, the better the action will be, but at the end of the round, you must pay — in coins — the total of your highest-valued dice color. Thus, taking dice of the same color makes for better actions, but will cost more coins.

After each player has taken four turns, the round ends. Each player must discard one of their ringmaster cards and score points according to its requirements. After three rounds, the game ends, and the player who has collected the most points wins.

In more detail, players start the game with four ringmaster cards and a unique trainer tile. Each ringmaster card provides a special ability (which is triggered when you place a die on it) and a unique end-of-round scoring opportunity. When you choose a ringmaster card to discard and score at the end of the round, you must therefore also take into consideration which special abilities you want to keep.

In addition to your main action, you may use trainers on your personal unique trainer tiles or on common trainer spaces on the game board for various benefits.

At the end of each round, in order of the players’ highest-ranked performances, players choose a new ringmaster card and a trainer tile, providing new abilities and scoring opportunities for the next round.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Dice Drafting
  • Dice Rolling
  • Economic
  • Grid Coverage
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.14

Maglev Metro

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Maglev Metro

Maglev Metro

In Maglev Metro, utilize state-of-the-art magnetic levitation technology to build a metropolitan rail system, transporting workers and robots beneath the city. Replace aging Manhattan and Berlin subway systems with newer, faster, quieter technology. Enhance your rail system’s abilities so that your passengers arrive at their destinations first.

Efficiency is your key to success in this pick-up-and-deliver, tile-laying, engine-building game. Transparent tiles allow your route to overlap your opponents’ tracks, winding you along from station to station. Robots efficiently upgrade and adjust your abilities, leveraging unique goals to maximize points. By the end of the game, the game board has morphed into a modern subway map, with brightly-colored routes connecting stations all over the city.

Maglev Metro contains two unique maps.

Game Mechanics:

  • Network Building
  • Pick-Up and Deliver
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.74

Intrepid

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Intrepid

Intrepid

Intrepid is a game about surviving 220 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. Players take the role of astronauts from a variety of nations, bringing their unique technologies to bear. Players must work together to generate enough life-sustaining resources each round, all while working to resolve the disaster they are facing.

Intrepid is a strategic and highly asymmetric cooperative game for 1-4 players that takes between 60-90 minutes to play. With a variety of nations and disaster scenarios, each which play completely differently, every game of Intrepid will be completely unique.

Game Mechanics:

  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.37

Honey Buzz

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Honey Buzz

Honey Buzz

The bees have discovered economics. The queens believe that if they sell honey to the bears, badgers, and woodland creatures, they will find peace and prosperity. Spring has arrived and it’s time to build the hive, find nectar, make honey, and, for the first time ever, set up shop.

Honey Buzz is a worker bee placement game where players expand a personal beehive by drafting various honeycomb tiles that grant actions that are triggered throughout the game. Each tile represents a different action. Whenever a tile is laid so that it completes a certain pattern, a ring of actions is triggered in whatever order the player chooses. A tile drafted on turn one could be triggered up to three times at any point during the game. It all depends on how the player places their beeples (bee+meeple) and builds their hive. After all, in the honey business, efficiency is queen.

As you continually expand your hive, you’ll forage for nectar and pollen, make honey, sell different varieties at the bear market, host honey tastings, and attend to the queen and her court. There’s only so much nectar to go around, and finding it won’t be easy. Players will have to scout out the nectar field and pay attention to other players searches to try to deduce the location of the nectar they need for themselves.

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Grid Movement
  • Memory
  • Open Drafting
  • Pattern Building
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.75

Hellenica: Story of Greece

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Hellenica: Story of Greece

Hellenica: Story of Greece

An explosion of creativity and violence erupted in the Aegean Basin in 800 B.C. that defined ancient Greece. This combination of science, mythology, development, and war was led by powerful city-states like Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Troy, Byzantium, Corcyra, and Thebes. These states vied for control over their rivals and dominated the lesser states around them. In time, some of them became so well known that they are remembered even today.

Hellenica: Story of Greece is a 3.5X civilization game in which you harness the powers of one of seven beginning city-states to dominate the world around you. Your goal is to become the preeminent symbol of Greece for all posterity by completing a combination of secret and public goals. Will you be remembered as a warmonger or a peaceful philosopher? Great priest or apostate? Will you develop a devotion to the gods or focus on the advancement of your people?

Can you guide your civilization during these turbulent times? Will your vision of Hellenic civilization be remembered for all time, or will you merely be a stepping stone for another…?

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Area Movement
  • Bluffing
  • City Building
  • Dice Rolling
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 7 Players
  • 120 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.26

Glass Road

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Glass Road

Glass Road

The game Glass Road commemorates the 700-year-old tradition of glass-making in the Bavarian Forest. (Today, the “Glass Road” is a route through the Bavarian forest that takes visitors to many of the old glass houses and museums of that region.) You must skillfully manage your glass and brick production in order to build the right structures that help you keep your business flowing. Cut the forest to keep the fires burning in the ovens, and spread and remove ponds, pits, and groves to supply yourself with the items you need. Fifteen specialists are there at your side to carry out your orders…

In more detail, the game consists of four building periods. Each player has an identical set of fifteen specialist cards, and each specialist comes with two abilities. At the beginning of each building period, you choose a hand of five specialists. If during this building period, you play a specialist that no other player has in hand, you may use both abilities on that card; if two or more players play the same specialist, each of them may use only one of the two abilities. Exploiting the abilities of these specialists lets you collect resources, lay out new landscape tiles (e.g., ponds and pits), and build a variety of buildings, which come in three types:

  • Processing buildings
  • “Immediate” buildings with a one-time effect
  • Buildings that provide bonus points at the end of the game for various accomplishments

Mastering the balance of knowing the best specialist card to play and being flexible about when you play it — together with assembling a clever combination of buildings — is the key to this game.

Game Mechanics:

  • City Building
  • Economic
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.97

Ginkgopolis

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Ginkgopolis

Ginkgopolis

2212: Ginkgo Biloba, the oldest and strongest tree in the world, has become the symbol of a new method for building cities in symbiosis with nature. Humans have exhausted the resources that the Earth offered them, and humanity must now develop cities that maintain a delicate balance between resource production and consumption. Habitable space is scarce, however, and mankind must now face the challenge of building ever upwards. To develop this new type of city, you will gather a team of experts around you, and try to become the best urban planner for Ginkgopolis.

In Ginkgopolis, the city tiles come in three colors: yellow, which provides victory points; red, which provides resources; and blue, which provides new city tiles. Some tiles start in play, and they’re surrounded by letter markers that show where new tiles can be placed.

On a turn, each player chooses a card from his hand simultaneously. Players reveal these cards, adding new tiles to the border of the city in the appropriate location or placing tiles on top of existing tiles. Each card in your hand that you don’t play is passed on to your left-hand neighbor, so keep in mind how your play might set up theirs!

When you add a new tile to the city, you take a “power” card of the same color, and these cards provide you additional abilities during the game, allowing you to scale up your building and point-scoring efforts.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • City Building
  • Open Drafting
  • Tableau Building
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.91

Dinosaur World

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The triumph of science that led to dinosaurs returning to the world once more has become public knowledge. New parks spring up regularly, often beginning operations even before everything has been finalized. There is no shortage of patrons eager to be entertained by these returned species in new and exciting ways. However, as with any form of entertainment, elements of triumph are often accompanied by elements of tragedy. This means it is of the utmost importance that you take every precaution by ensuring each visitor signs the safety waiver before enjoying the wonders of Dinosaur World!

Each round in Dinosaur World, you draft a new résumé card to acquire new workers; spend workers to take public actions building your park and acquiring DNA; spend further workers to take private actions improving that park; then drive your jeep around experiencing the wonder and excitement of what you have built! Throughout the game you acquire victory points through a variety of means — and possibly a few visitor deaths as a natural consequence of overly enthusiastic dinosaur encounters. At the end of the game, you lose points if you accumulated too many deaths, then the player with the most points wins!

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Income
  • Movement Points
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.27