The World Is Your Canvas
“The world is your canvas, and the tiles are your paintbrushes…”
When I began to think of this article, I remembered a lovely commercial for Adobe Photoshop.
I have very little knowledge in photo editors, but still I think the commercial is great. And if it left an impression on me, then it worked, didn't it?
What
In this article, I’ll touch the Tile Laying Mechanic in board games. This is a versatile and common mechanic, so I can’t really cover it, but more get the sense of it. In tile based games, players take turns placing tiles on a board to create a landscape, city, or other design. The tiles may be different shapes and sizes, and they may have different features or resources. Players score points based on how they place their tiles and what they create with it, together with other mechanics.
Why
Tile laying games are a great way to express your creativity and strategic thinking. They allow players to create the board and generate a feeling of accomplishment once the game is over. As a bonus, tile laying games can be a great way to introduce new players to the world of board games. They are typically easy to learn and quick to play, and they can be enjoyed by people of all ages.
For Example
I think the most famous tile laying game is Carcassonne. In this game, players take turns to pick up a random square tile and place it adjacent to tiles that have already been played. Tiles depict a city, a road, a monastery, grassland, or combination of the previous mentioned. Tiles must be set, so roads connect to roads, cities to cities etc. Once set, the player has the chance to claim the city, road, field or monastery, if it wasn’t claimed already.
The game came out in 2000 and since then more than 15 expansions and mini expansions have come out to make the game more competitive and interactive. Each expansion adds more different looking tiles, and in fact you can play the game with several sets of the base game, which led 3 players in 2016 to set a world record. They played for 25 hours and built a 108 × 92 grid made of 10,007 tiles.
Next up is Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King. In this game, players will also set tiles to build their own domain around the basic castle. Here too, you’ll have to adhere to certain tile placing rules. But different from Carcassonne here you’ll bid on tiles rather than just rely on luck.
Each round, each player draws 3 landscape tiles and places them face up in front of their player screen. Behind the screen, the player will assign a price for 2 of them and mark the 3rd as discard. Then all players reveal at once the prices for their tiles. The price set by each player for a tile is the price other players must pay to buy this tile, but if the price is too high, the player must buy the tile himself.
This auctioning of tiles leaves players with a critical pricing decision of how to max the price they will get for each tile on one hand and not overpay for it themselves on the other.
This game is a little more complex than Carcassonne, yet selecting the right tiles and placing them correctly is still critical.
Last, let's take a look at the recently published game of Clank!: Catacombs.
In this dungeon crawler, players will compete against each other to be the one that managed to escape the dungeon carrying at least 1 dragon relic and a lot more loot. The game begins with all players standing at the dungeon entrance. Each turn, players can move around the tile, but can also move out of the tile they are standing on. When this happens, the moving player needs to commit to an exit path and pick a random tile. The player must use the tile and move into it, whether he likes it or not. To allow the player some decision space, he may rotate it and select the area on the tile he prefers to move into.
This tile laying game is different from the previous two by not leaving the same freedom to the player to decide where to put a tile. This is intended to capture the exploring aspect, where you cannot know what awaits you around the corner in the dungeon. On the other hand, on the tile itself, there are much more elements to consider and give the player a sense of control over the character.
Tile laying games are many and versatile. In this article, I only touched the tip of the iceberg I encourage you to get to know many more, as each one offers this basic intuitive mechanic as a basis for other mechanics to create a full-fledged game.