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?