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.

It’s apparently all collaborative all the time, on one board, which results in super-spazzy play. Craziness.

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.

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.

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.