Summary

• Games like Carcassonne and Azul create beautiful landscapes through tile placement, rewarding strategic thinking and balance.
• Cascadia and Kingdomino offer a different take on tile placement, focusing on nature and strategic selection of tiles.
• Patchwork and Bärenpark are themed around quilts and bear zoos, providing a unique twist on the tile-laying genre.

Board games often take place on grids. It’s the simplest way to give visual and mathem🐲atical structure to a chunk of space, allowing pieces to move about in predictable, limited ways without anyone needing to break out a ruler. Neat arrangements of squares and hexagons make for gameplay that’s easy to follow and think through without any external tools.

While many strategy games take advantage of this by using a board to regulate how you move pieces, there are just as many excellent games that have you place the tiles themselves—sometimes stacking other things on top of them afterward—in order to create a board that’s advantageous for you. Here are some of the best games that revolve around placing 🅺tiles.

We begin with a g♎ame specifically designed, in part, to serve as an introduction to modern strategy gaming, Carcassonne. This tile-placement game has players build a largescale medieval landscape, full of castles, churches, r💯oads, and the fields between them, one tile at a time.

It’s a dirt-simple game, with each player drawing a single tile each turn and choosing where to place it. Though this can create frustrating situations when you find yourself never seeming to get the tile you need, it also keeps the game simple for new players. Big moments, when you manage to finish a largeꦿ castle or long road, are rarer🐽 than they should be, but this game can be amazingly satisfying when you manage to pull one off.

Named for the natural beauty of the region of North America in which it takes place, Cascadia has players building a sprawling landscape by plaꦉcing terrain tiles to create patches of forest, water, mountain, desert, and the like, then placing animals on top of them to create patterns that earn points.

Like many tile-laying games, it 🌊does an amazing job being approachable while still having rich strategy. It’s a bit more intricate than Carcassonne, but is🌜 still simple enough to be a great place for new gamers to get into the genre.

For more beautiful games, many of which also have players create their own natural landscapes, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:check out this list!

This one is an absolute treasure. Tsuro is a brilliant pathfinding, tile-laying game that casts the players as dragons, and tasks them with creating their flightpath by placing tiles on the board. Whenever a tile is placed in front of your dragon, usually by you, but occasionally not, you must follow it to its conclusion. Using this simple mechanic, you move around the board and𝐆 try to force players off of it🐎, in hopes of being the last dragon standing.

This game is short—only fifteen minutes or so per playthrough—but it does a wonderful job rewarding strategi💮c and forward thinking. It also does a great job incorporating itsꦉ tone into its mechanics. This is a game about majestic, peaceful dragons following beautiful, curved paths, and the mechanics reward a passive and avoidant playstyle. Being aggressive is usually a mistake in this game. The best way to win is to avoid your opponents until they all crash into each other on their own.

Most tile place♈ment games contextualize their tiles in terms of something grander, like the maje♐sty of nature or the craftsmanship of urban planning. In Azul, however, the artistic arrangement of tiles represents nothing more or less than the artistic arrangement of tiles.

That is to say, this game casts the players as artisans creating mosaics, which they do through a relatively abstract and c𓆏omplicated process. There’s no intent here to simulate the actual process of making a mosaic, but that fact leaves this game free to develop its own mechanics, and those mechanics are interesting and finely crafted to make for compelling strategic gameplay.

Terraforming Mars is a science-fiction tile plac🔥ement game that has each player take on the role of a different corporation—there are dozens to choose from, each with their own abilities and special objectives—and participating in the multi-generational task of terraforming Mars.

Tile placement is only one element of this complex game. There’s also engine-building card-based mechanics to be found, and both they and the tile placement mechanics are constantly interacting with the global parameters that have to be optimized for Mars to be terraformed. It’s a lot to keep track of, but as a result, there’s a lot in this game to sink your teeth into! 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:For more sci-fi board games💖, check out this list!

Kingdom𝓡ino is another kingdom-building tile-laying game that has players competing to build medi✨eval landscapes in order to gain points. The tile-laying aspect of this game is pretty simple. You create a small grid and have to lay tiles within it in such a way that their terrain matches that of their neighbors.

What really sets this game apart is the strategic way those tiles are chosen. Each round, the order in which players choose their next tile shifts dynamically based on who chose what in the previous round, forcing players to balance which tiles are best for them strategically with the desire to have a better selection next turn. For more games with a medieval theme, check out our list of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:best Fantasy board games!

Another game that casts you as an artisan, Patchwork has you crafting your very own quilt made of variously-shaped collections of squares, which you must place onto a square grid. There are a couple of different ways this game gives you points, but they all revolve around💙 finding good ways to fit your patches snugly onto your quilt.

Making your pieces fit together is the key to victory here. A board full of tightly packed pieces, with no space wasted, will get you the points you need to win. A board full of holes will cost you the game. You and your opponent are constantly competing for options, and you have 🌟to think ahead and be adaptable if you’re going to win.

Yet another game about fitting Tetris tiles sn﷽ugly onto your personal board, Barenpark’s various pieces represent enclosures and other structures in your very own bear zoo. Why you and your opponents are building a zoo exclusively for bears is unclear, but the tile-laying experience that results is excellent.

Unlike in Patchwork, your personal board will expand a few times over the course of the game. It starts out small♉, 🙈so making things fit is never too easy, but it keeps getting bigger, so it doesn’t get too difficult too quickly. This keeps the game engaging throughout.

1 FAQ

What is the German game with tiles?

Odds are, you’re thinking of Carcassonne. Though it is named after a French settlement, the game was originally crea𝔍ted and published in Germany.

What is the game with black and white circle tiles?

You’re probably thinking of Go. Go is a classic board game—about 2500 years old—that has players lay black and white stones on a square grid. Obviously, Go is far older than the popularization of tile-placement games as a genre, though the🌃re is an argument to be made that it’s technically a tile-placement game.