Tile Placement Games
I’m doing a bit of a survey of tile placement games, and asking: how do they restrict tile placement? What purpose or interactivity do those tiles have after they’re placed? Here are a few, though there are many more:
- Dominoes: very simple. Placement is restricted by requiring matching numbers on each tile. Only end dominoes are interactive; pieces in the middle are unimportant for placement restrictions or scoring.
- Scrabble: placement is restricted by a grid, as well as the English language (or, more accurately, a giant Scrabble dictionary). Most tiles remain in play throughout the game, though scoring is fixed at the time the tiles are placed. The game board itself adds bonus scoring to some placement positions.
- Go: placement is fairly unrestricted, limited to uninhabited locations on a game grid. Because adjacent tiles work together to chain, much of the board remains interactive throughout the game. Many non-interactive situations actually cause the game pieces to be removed from the board, resulting in a highly complex and dynamic game.
- Tangrams: tile placement is technically not restricted aside from the board’s boundaries. The pieces have no purpose beyond their shape, resulting in a fairly simple geometric puzzle game.
- Zombies!!!: tiles must be adjacent, and essentially within a grid. Furthermore, roads may not be blocked by tile placement. Placing a tile causes a certain number of zombie, bullet, and life tokens to come into existence on the tile. Players and zombies roll dice and move about this player-created board. The tile placement portion of the game is fairly simple, but since it defines the geography for the rest of the game’s action, most tiles remain interactive throughout the game. Players use event cards to further spice up gameplay.
- Carcassonne: Tile placement is somewhat similar to Zombies!!!, in that terrain types must be respected. Carcassonne has more types, with grass, road, and city edges. When a player places a tile, the player may choose to place another type of game piece (a follower) onto the tile, sometimes with multiple options as to where. Some areas of the board become completed as the game progresses, though some adjacency chaining (fields) causes large amounts of the board to remain in play for the duration. Unlike Zombies!!!, pieces do not move around the game board, and tile information is only used to restrict placement of tiles and followers, and for scoring.
Wikipedia has some more (such as the tile placement version of Diceland), though it lists tile-based games, not just tile placement games.
I find tile placement games exciting for several reasons. Their rules tend to be intuitive, but lend themselves to depth. Tiles can provide layers of gameplay: their edges, shapes, or other characteristics can restrict placement; their attributes (such as color, terrain type, printed rules, etc.) can influence gameplay or scoring in other ways. On a visceral level, the simple action of placing a tile is satisfying.
Do you have any tile placement games you’ve enjoyed? What is it you like about them? Do you like the difficult process of deciding which tiles to place and where, such as Go or Scrabble? Do you prefer playing on a game board of your own construction, such as Zombies!!!? What about the loose diplomacy and planning behind a game of Carcassonne?
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 am
You know, you forgot Tetris.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Damn, Transiit beat me to it.
And with Tetris you also get a billion other games based on the “tiles + gravity = fun” formula.
What are all the things I could possibly care about when placing a tile?
1.Location relative to an underlying board structure (Scrabble double-word score) and/or relative to other placed tiles.
2.Orientation relative to an underlying board structure and/or relative to other placed tiles.
3.Tile content relative to an underlying board structure and/or relative to other placed tiles.
I like the idea of an almost advent calendar-like board, where some underlying elements are known and others are revealed over time or by proximity — something to balance randomness and skill.
You could easily make the case that chess is a tile-based game.
I had a nightmare once about a multiplayer hybrid of Chess and Qix that turned players progressively more selfish and evil the more they played it.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Haha. Not forgot, actually, I just axed all of the match line/three/two/breaker games from my brainstorming because I wanted to focus on additive games. Go is an exception, but I preferred it over Othello.
I probably should have mentioned Tetris, though, because even if you’re doing additive, it’s got very interesting constraints: not just the time limit, but the ability to only add from one side. The “rotate in place” mechanic of some versions is a weakening of that constraint that possibly adds depth.
Chess is possibly tile-based, but not tile placement, in that all of the pieces start on the board. Go is an example of a game that works with pieces on a defined grid, just like Chess, but is about placement
Item # 3 seems to be where most multiplayer games get their complexity, in part because you generally have the content of “who does this piece belong to”. Once you add the ability of tiles to influence other tiles over distance, such as the adjacency-based grouping in Go, complexity can quickly get out of hand for some players. Many games try to restrict the impact this can have on gameplay, especially if they incorporate a time limit.
There is some sort of competitive tangram-like game, however, in which players take turns placing pieces and attempt to not be the first person who cannot place a tile. I forget what it’s called, but it gets 100% of its gameplay from items 1 and 2.
Your advent calendar idea reminds me of another, almost Tetris-level game I didn’t mention, which is Minesweeper. I don’t know if it’s a tile placement game, in that placing a tile doesn’t change anything about the game state except whether or not you’ve won or lost. They simply reveal a board state that was created before you started.
One thing I find interesting about Zombies!!! is the helipad tile: it’s a bit like a “reveal”, even though a player places it. That’s the point at which every player says “holy crap, THAT’s where the end goal is, let’s get there”. I could imagine similar dynamics with your advent calendar style board.
You told me about that nightmare before. I’m not entirely sure it’s a nightmare, in that if you could actually make that game, you’d have demonstrated an insanely powerful and heretofore unacknowledged power of the medium. Sure, the people who played it would have to be quarantined, but you can’t make an omelet without indefinitely detaining a few people.
January 8th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
http://www.uniqlo.com/grid/
I can’t really tell what the hell’s going on here, and I’m not going to join their site just so I can find out, but it’s got tiles and a grid.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
You don’t have to join– just enter a nick and click join. Which is, uh, not joining.
It’s apparently all collaborative all the time, on one board, which results in super-spazzy play. Craziness.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
I think you should check out the game I got Gordon for his birthday - the Infernal Contraption. It has some very interesting mechanics in restricting tile placement (edges must match, and while the horizontal can go forever you can only go to a depth of 1 tile above/below the main line). The interesting thing is that the entire thing “fires” once per turn, starting at the top left, and moving down and then right - so if you build intelligently, you actually get more powerful combos from having events happen in the correct order. It has some other cool stuff, like 1 time use tiles, your opponents removing or moving tiles around, etc.
Around new year’s I played a different tile like game called Ubongo (sp?) - basically speed tanagrams with tetris-like pieces and an interesting scoring structure. Essentially you would roll a dice to tell you the set of pieces to use to fill in a shape - whoever finished first had more options of moving around on the scoring card, which was full of gem columns. Scoring was by whoever had the most of their primary color, with ties going to their next most common color - for example, if I had 5 red and 3 yellow, and you had 4 blue and 4 yellow, I would win (I had 5 of a kind, you had 4). If I had 4 red, 2 blue and 2 yellow, and you had 4 blue, 3 green and 1 white, you would win - we both had 4 of our most common color, but you had 3 of your next color while I had 2.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Sounds VERY interesting. Tell Gordon to gimme a ring if he wants to get his Contraption on.